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Talking Copyright at the Barras

Posted on    by Kerry Patterson
Blog

Talking Copyright at the Barras

By 14 November 2016No Comments

On Saturday 12th November, CREATe staff joined university colleagues to bring a range of social science research to visitors at Glasgow’s famous Barrowlands (Barras) market. As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences, the Barras Social was a day of exhibitions, games, music and family activities designed to show  how research affects the public – and to allow visitors to interact directly with researchers. The university’s stalls could be found among the regular stalls in the indoor area of the market. CREATe was housed in a former blinds stall.

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CREATe stall at the Glasgow’s famous Barrowlands (Barras) market.

The market has been in existence for nearly 100 years in the east end of Glasgow, but with instances of copyright infringement associated with the venue in the recent past, it is certainly an appropriate venue in which to discuss copyright. We used the Digitising the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks project to talk to visitors about authorship and ownership of copyright. The stall was based around four core questions:

  • If you don’t know who the copyright holder is, can you still use a work in copyright?
  • Who owns the copyright in a scrapbook?
  • What is an orphan work?
  • Where can I find out about copyright?

Edwin Morgan lived in Glasgow throughout his life and much of his poetry (and scrapbooks) refer to the city. Visitors were able to make their own scrapbooks to display or take away, creating their own unique works using contemporary printed material, like Morgan did, or using copies of cuttings from the Scrapbooks. The stall was also included on a question trail around the market.

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Visitors were encouraged to make their own scrapbook pages at the CREATe stall.

The event provided an interesting opportunity to present academic work in a non-academic manner and our stall proved to be a good starting point to talk generally about copyright and to provide information on Copyright User.