Below you will find the members of our Policy Committee:
- Pekka Heikkinen (Finland)
- Ignasi Labastida i Juan (Spain)
- Felix Reda (Germany)
- Ariadna Matas (Spain)
- Benjamin White (United Kingdom)
- Susan Reilly (Ireland)
- Barbara Szczepanska (Poland)
- Barbara Stratton (United Kingdom)
- Harald Müller (Germany)
Pekka Heikkinen
Pekka graduated as Master of Arts (in Social Sciences) and Master of Laws, both degrees from University of Helsinki. He has served in planning positions in the Ministry of Education and in the Ministry of Labor, and worked as a researcher in the University of Helsinki, department of Social Policy.
Since 2005 he has been working as a legal advisor in the National Library of Finland. Pukka is a member in all relevant national organs in the field of copyright set by the Government of Finland and Ministry of Culture. He is also the founder of a joint national CHI legal group.
For several years he has been a member of EBLIDA, CENL and LIBER legal groups. During 2007-2015 he was a member of the IFLA CLM group and has recently rejoined the group for the period of 2021-2023
Ignasi Labastida
Ignasi Labastida holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Barcelona. He works as Head of the Research Unit at the University of Barcelona’s Learning and Research Resources Centre (CRAI) where he also leads the Office for the Dissemination of Knowledge. Since March 2021 he is the Rector’s Delegate for Open Science in the same university.
Currently, he chairs the Board of SPARC Europe and the Info and Open Access Policy Group at the LERU (League of European Research Universities). He is also a member of the Open Scence Ambassadors Network at the LERU on behalf of the University of Barcelona
He is the co-author of the LERU Roadmap for Research Data and the LERU Roadmap on Open Science. He is a member of several Open Science working groups at CRUE, FECYT and at the Research Directorate of the Catalan Government.
Felix Reda
Felix Reda is a copyright expert and founder of the strategic litigation project control © at German fundamental rights litigation NGO Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Rights). Between 2014 and 2019, Felix was a Member of the European Parliament, with a policy focus on the EU copyright directive and the regulation of online platforms. Felix is a Shuttleworth Fellow and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Felix holds an M.A. in political science and communications science from Mainz University, Germany.
Ariadna Matas
Ariadna Matas works as a Policy Adivsor for the Europeana Foundation, where she contributes to the management, development and implementation of Europeana’s policies and frameworks with a strong focus on copyright law. In her role at Europeana, she supports the Europeana Copyright Community, a group of professionals interested in copyright and digital cultural heritage that cultivate, curate and share knowledge around this topic. She also supports the work of the Rights Statements Consortium to develop, maintain and encourage the use of the rights statements. Ariadna is a member of Creative Commons’ Global Network Copyright Platform, NEMO’s Working Group on Digitisation & IPR, the Libraries and IP group at the Spanish Federation of Library Associations and the Rights Statements Consortium Statements and Implementation Working Groups. Ariadna studied law at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and holds a Master’s in Intellectual Property Law at the CEIPI – Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies in Strasbourg, France. Before joining Europeana, Ariadna worked for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) on copyright matters.
Benjamin White
Benjamin is one of the founders of Knowledge Rights 21, co-chairs the Policy Committee along with chairing LIBER’s Copyright and Legal Matters Working Group . He is a researcher at Bournemouth University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management focussing on Artificial Intelligence, copyright law and its intersection with international trade law.
He is active in the intellectual property field within the UK and the EU, having sat on a number of bodies including the BBC’s Creative Archive Advisory Board, the UK Government’s Creative Economy Programme (Competition and Intellectual Property), i2010 Digital Libraries Programme, as well as the Institute of Public Policy Research’s Advisory Board on Intellectual Property and the Public Sphere.
Benjamin also chaired the copyright group of the Council for European National Librarians and currently sits on the UK Intellectual Property Office’s Copyright Research Expert Advisory Group. He has spoken as an expert legal witness at the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament, as well as at the BEIS Select Committee and a number of All Party groups in the UK.
Susan Reilly
Susan Reilly is Associate Librarian for Collections and Archives at University College Dublin.
She is actively engaged in copyright and open access related issues at international level and is member of the IFLA Committee for Copyright and Other Legal Matters, a co-chair of the IFLA Open Access Task Force.
In Ireland she co-chairs the National Open Research Framework Open Access Steering Committee and is Deputy Chair of the Consortium of National and University Libraries Regulatory Affairs Committee.
Barbara Szczepańska
Barbara is a librarian and information specialist. After graduation, she worked in the information department of the academic library, than after a few years she moved to the law firm sector, with which she is still working today, currently as a Research Services Manager at Hogan Lovells.
She is actively engaged in copyright related issues. During her career she has been a member of several national and international professional organizations, serving as the copyright advocacy and policy advisor including Polish Librarians Association, Polish Academic Libraries Board of Directors, IFLA’s Copyright and other Legal Matters Committee (IFLA-CLM), LIBER’s Copyright and Legal Matters Working Group. As a EIFL, Copyright Programme coordinator for Poland she represented library organisations at WIPO meetings and was involved in the revisions to Polish copyright laws in 2015.
Barbara Stratton
Barbara is co-chair and one of the founders of Knowledge Rights 21 and brings substantial experience in copyright policymaking and advocacy for access to knowledge through libraries and archives to government, legislators and copyright stakeholders.
She serves as Expert Adviser to both LIBER’s Copyright and Legal Matters Working Group and IFLA’s Copyright and other Legal Matters Advisory Committee (IFLA-CLM). During ten years representing library organisations at WIPO meetings, she supported the campaigns to end the global ‘book famine’ affecting visually impaired people culminating in the Marrakesh VIP Treaty 2013 and to establish a cross-border international copyright exceptions framework for libraries, archives, museums, education, and research.
A member of LACA, the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance, she played a significant rôle in bringing about groundbreaking revisions to UK copyright laws in 2014 that inspired similar changes to EU and other countries’ laws. She was LACA’s Vice-Chair 2014-20 and currently serves as LACA’s international spokesperson. Also Chair of EBLIDA’s Expert Group on Information Law 2015-19, she collaborated closely with IFLA, LIBER, Europeana, and SPARC Europe to secure the best possible outcomes in the Digital Single Market Directive and EU Marrakesh legislation.
Barbara holds a Postgraduate Diploma in UK, EU and US Copyright Law from Kings College London.
Harald Müller
Harald Müller is a German librarian and lawyer, well known as an expert in the area of library law. He had hold positions as policy advisor International Federation of Library Associations IFLA, director of the library in the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public law and International Law in Heidelberg and librarian at the University Library Mannheim. Up to 2009 he chaired the legal commission (Rechtskommission) of the German Library Association, which he still supports as expert for library law. At present he is the deputy speaker of the Coalition for Action “Copyright for Education and Research”.
Until recently he was a member of the Experts Group on Information Law (EGIL) of EBLIDA, the document delivery and resource sharing section of IFLA, the German Alliance of Research Organizations legal experts group, as well as the legal experts group of NESTOR and editor of the journal „Recht Bibliothek Dokumentation RBD“. Earlier activities covered offices in national and international library organizations as for instance German Library Institute, the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) and the IFLA Committee for copyright and legally matters. Since 2003 he lectures library law at the Bavarian library academy and has published widely (174 publications and 428 presentations) on all aspects of library law.
