Perhaps we were a little vague, but this is just an initial announcement and we’ll be bringing more details as we get a bit closer to the event. But, for now, let me try to flesh out a few things:

Copia has several concrete goals both general and specific. One obvious element is to continue and expand our role, established through Techdirt, of helping to shape the conversation about policy and business models related to innovation (such as long-standing Techdirt conversations about media businesses, patent issues, etc.). A big element of that will be expanding our research efforts — for example, Techdirt’s Sky Is Rising reports have been very useful to people in the policy world pushing more sensible copyright policy, and we’d like to be producing far more research like that, in the copyright area as well as lots of others, in order to be constantly arming those people with good, solid data to back up their arguments.

So one of the things you can count on seeing from Copia is research — an event like this, where we bring together lots of experts to discuss these topics (see the website for some of the specific discussions at the Summit) is also about laying the groundwork for future research — as we identify people with interesting ideas or knowledge or data on various topics, we’ll be continuing to work with those people to produce relevant research and other publications (things like education campaigns, guidebooks, reference tools) in the weeks and months following the Summit.

But we also don’t want to be limited to just research papers, nor are we solely focused on policy. One of the biggest focuses is ways to route around policy issues. Some examples of this include things like Twitter’s patent licensing system (to route around the issue of future patent trolls somehow abusing defensive patents), Creative Commons (providing easy copyright opt-outs and open licensing where automatic copyright law does not really allow for such a thing), or ContentID. We want to identify ways that programs like these can be expanded, and new ideas for things like this that can be created/built, and act as promoters and project coordinators among Copia members to make that happen. For example, we’d love to see more companies adopt open licensing systems for their patents, and we’d love to see there be more CC-like options (including stronger public domain dedications) for content creators.

The General Counsel roundtable also has a very specific goal. We want to create a “statement of innovation principles” that for companies that provide services and platforms and other things, as for how they will promote/protect innovation. This includes things like how they structure their terms of service and their content policies, ideas like not abusing patents or other IP, commitment to things like data portability and open API access, and so on. This is a project that will develop over time — first the GCs from major tech companies will discuss it and start to flesh it out at the event, then we’ll open it up for discussion with everyone present, then afterwards we’ll be setting it up online for public comment. The end-goal is to turn it into something that companies openly, publicly adopt and agree to — and which users begin to respect, and then expect — and that it will have a real effect on how they do business.

And there is more. So, trust us: though some of these topics are big and nebulous and hard to pin down, our goals aren’t the same — in fact, bringing these big-think discussions into the realm of reality, and making real plans for the immediate future, is central to what we want to do.