The Creative Commons is a great initiative with the aim of making it easier to spread culture with the help of permissive copyright licenses that everyone can use.  Millions of people, organizations and companies have chosen to publish their creations with one of these pro-freedom licenses.

One of the most interesting CC-creators is the Blender Foundation who produces both a 3D-graphics suite, Blender, as well as a number of great short movies that have been created with it. The software is open source and all of the movies have been released under Creative Commons licenses.

I recently made a visit in Moscow with the International Trades Committee of the European Parliament to investigate the views of various Russian stakeholders on the Russian World Trade Organisation accession. We were able to meet members of the Duma, the Russian parliament. That was interesting.

The European deputies all were not able to understand how the Russians could be skeptical of the WTO. They were very concerned with live-stock imports and gas. The Russians responded that in Europe we subsidize our agricultural sector with 40% of our total budget, in Russia the equivalent subsidy level is only 2%. There can be no fair competition between two such completely different approaches of subsidies, they said. Apparently one of the more problematic aspects for Russia with the WTO accession is also the TRIPs implementations needed. We didn't detail on this during our meetings, but I want to remember the TRIPs negotiations with Russia having been exceptionally hard a few years ago.

I met also, outside of the delegation, with Mr Ilya Ponomarev, a social-democrat deputy of the DUMA who is in the opposition and has also made himself known as an opponent to Putin. He said that he had never had as many problems collaborating with Medvedev and that the dividing line for him always was whether or not the political leader of Russia was honest with their intentions or not.

During a recent visit in Moscow with the International Trades Committee of the European Parliament to investigate the views of various Russian stakeholders on the Russian WTO accession, I took the liberty of meeting up with other people who are not normally so affiliated with the parliament activities neither in Europe nor in Russia.

And so I came to find out about promodj.ru (for artists, listeners, agents), InstAgent (to put agents and artists in touch), ivi.ru (film distribution) and dreamindustries.ru (content distribution for users, readers, educators and listeners). Less obvious in terms of end-users is mobile phone company IMMO which makes integrated services for operators to provide to their end-consumers (B2B or business-to-business sales), but which also facilitates new distribution models for particularly music.

Dreamindustries do educational services, music distribution and book distribution. They have contracts with all mayor book publishers in Russia, and they are in contact with music distributors.

The reasons they have successfully obtained contracts with distributors, they say, is that in Russia, because of the distances, physical distribution is simply too difficult (relating to books) and the incomes have been dropping so fast that the industry is in a position where they have to compromise. Also, the domestic industry (that is, non-foreign owned enterprises) is not in a good position always to get help from the government, which means that there is no one aggressively defending them when they don't try new distribution models as has been the case in Europe and the US.

Thank you, Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, participants of the Internet Governance Forum 2012.

My name is Amelia Andersdotter. I am a member of the European Parliament on behalf of the Swedish Piratpartiet since December 2011. I am mindful of the fact that I am one of only two women speaking in the opening session. Also, I am probably the youngest person speaking. I am only 25 years old.

The Piratpartiet wants to change the legislative framework for communication, interaction, innovation and culture. We formed around the idea that communication technologies and culture present fantastic ways of building broad global communities.

We want interactions, social, cultural and economical to be determined by and under the control of the people interacting.

When information, communication and culture can be freely accessible and used, which on the internet is basically always the case, this should as a general principle always be allowed and any exceptions or deviations to that general rule must be kept exceptional.

Unfortunately, laws at both nation state level and the international level are very ill‑equipped to achieve these goals.

For instance, direct interventions by nation states into communication and cultural flows of their citizens are ubiquitous in the world. More insidious are the restrictions on communications imposed on users by private network operators or intellectual property rights holders.

We hear words like "freedom of speech" and "Human Rights must be respected online", but so far very few top political figures in the world have acknowledged, or are willing to acknowledge, that this will require regulatory intervention on some private sectors. We may also have to let go of some regulatory protections for private sector actors that we're currently putting in place to block communications between people.

Report: A parliamentary report is a document that formulates Parliament’s position about a specific topic. It contains amendments suggested by the committee who created it, and also explanations for them.

Rapporteur: Is the MEP who is in charge of preparing a report.

Shadow rapporteur (usually called just ‘shadow’): Is the MEP appointed by the political groups other than that of the rapporteur to follow a report and negotiate its amendments.

Shadow meeting: It is a meeting between the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs to develop the report they have been appointed for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuxGxxDljHo&feature=youtu.be