On May 31 – June 1 2011 Moscow hosted the international seminar “Open Educational Resources and Intellectual Property Rights”, organized by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE), UNESCO Moscow Office, and the UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) Sector in cooperation with the National Research University – Higher School of Economics. 

The event was attended by representatives of academic community, researchers, experts in open education and open educational resources (OER), in the intellectual property rights, as well as persons responsible for development of policy in OER sphere.

The first day of the seminar was devoted to consideration of experience of the open educational resources (OER) use in CIS countries and other non- English-speaking countries. Strategy of OER further development and advancement was also discussed. 

In the course of the seminar a number of UNESCO publications, projects and resources related to OER were presented.

On the second day of the seminar participants discussed legal aspects of use of the open licenses – instruments, which allow provision of free access to open educational resources and are based on principles of copyright. 

Reports on legal status of Creative Commons licenses in Russian legislation and existing problems were made by Elena Voynikanis, professor of the Higher School of Economics, and Vadim Kolosov, Head of legal firm specializing in the sphere of intellectual property rights and internet-legislation. 

IIS was represented at the seminar by Yuri Hohlov, Chairman of the IIS Board of Directors, Svetlana Vorozhbit, legal expert, and  Louisa Rizmanova, manager of Creative Commons project. Svetlana Vorozhbit reported on “Legal aspects of Creative Commons licenses use in the Russian Federation" and presented IIS activities related to this aspect performed by the Institute since 2010 as an official partner of  Creative Commons corporation. In the course of the presentation the launch of the Russian web-site Creative Commons was announced.