Nick Ashton-Hart

Geneva Representative

As CCIA's Geneva Representative, Nick represents the interests of CCIA and its members in world trade, intellectual property, and Internet governance policy to the UN,

its agencies member-states.

While he has more than 15 years’ experience working in international policy development and advocacy, unlike many policy professionals he started with successful careers in business in both the entertainment and ICT sectors. That experience gives him a practitioners’ view of both sectors.

His professional life began in the music industry managing performers; by the time he left music he had managed some of the world’s most successful and influential artist in the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown as well multi-platinum artists Heaven 17. This gives him a hands-on perspective of how copyright works at the practical level. In the tech sector he led a successful IT consultancy where his work ranged from advising companies on how to achieve greater ROI on their IT systems to designing and redesigning enterprise-wide IP based networks.

Before joining CCIA he was Director for At-Large and Senior Director for Participation and Engagement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Inc. (ICANN) and Executive Director of the International Music Managers Forum (IMMF), the international non-governmental organisation representing the interests of music managers and their clients. He is also the founding coordinator of a broad coalition of civil society NGOs, intellectual property rightsholders, libraries, consumer organisations and industrial stakeholders known as Copyright for Creativity (C4C) and was a key part of the founding Secretariat and organising committee of the International Music Registry project at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).