RightsCon Toronto 2018

Session Emcee: Isaac Stone Fish

WTO E-commerce agenda: What’s the deal? What’s on the plate? Are we ready? (European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Public Citizen)

Speakers: Burcu Kilic & Maryant Fernandez Perez

Since United States (US) President Trump took office, the US-centric free trade agreement model has been falling apart and global trade discussions have started to centralize around the World Trade Organization (WTO). Big trade players are now targeting the WTO as a reliable vehicle to foster a global digital trade agenda that will affect our human rights online. E-commerce and, more broadly, digital trade have become a hot topic in the current agenda of the WTO.

This lightning talk has three aims. First, we would like to show how important trade discussions are for the community. Second, we highlight the implications of some of the proposals for digital privacy, data protection, algorithms, encryption, competition or even cybersecurity. Third, we’ll show how to get involved in these discussions before it is too late. We have only two years to learn, understand, raise our voice and advocate for our rights. We need to be ready.

Protect your freedom to operate by sharing your innovative ideas! (Open Patent Office)

Speakers: Frederik Questier

We will discuss how defensive publications can be a very interesting solution for inventors and innovators, often preferable to patents. There is today however no popular open platform for sharing defensive publications. The Open Patent Office (http://openpatentoffice.org) is a start-up non-profit organization that aims to stimulate innovation by providing an open, free and social alternative to the traditional patent offices. It allows inventors to register their innovative ideas as open patents. Open patents act as defensive publications. The Open Patent Office publishes these descriptions, timestamps them, gives them an open patent number, classifies them, facilitates discussion and facilitates easy searching and finding by patent examiners and the general public.

Advancing Access to Digital Rights Law in the Global South: A Collaborative Strategy (SMEX)

Speakers: Jessica Dheere

During this lightning talk, I will present current challenges in locating law and caselaw affecting digital rights, particularly in the so-dubbed Global South, and present a high-level overview of elements of a collaborative strategy-in-development for meeting those challenges, including a working definition of digital rights, a legal research methodology, and an evolving data model. Specifically, we will introduce attendees to the tentatively named DiRiGO database of digital rights law and caselaw that contains more than 500 documents related to digital rights in Arab League countries. Attendees will also learn about an emerging community of practice at the intersection of ICT law and legal informatics and be encouraged to join and contribute their feedback and expertise.