User Generated Cultural Content (UGCC): Users as Creators, “Walled Gardens”, and the Preservation and Bequeathing of Novel Digital Cultural Assets

About this project

Lead investigator(s):
– Prof Lilian Edwards

Contributor(s):
– Ms Edina Harbinja

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Start Date: 1st October 2012

End Date: 30th September 2016

Summary

This project looked at the legal, social and economic issues arising from User Generated Cultural Content. The focus was on the case study of what happens on the death of the creator of the UGCC, as this challenges offline notions of property, control, succession, contract and reputation/privacy, as well as invoking the public interest in preservation of digital and digitised heritage.

Project outputs include:

• Protecting Post-Mortem Privacy: Reconsidering the Privacy Interests of the Deceased in a Digital World – this provides an analysis of comparative common and civilian law institutions, focusing on personality rights, defamation, moral rights and freedom of testation, and confirms that there is little support for post-mortem privacy in common law.
• “What happens to my Facebook profile when I die?”: Legal Issues Around Transmission of Digital Assets on Death – this CREATe working paper explores some of the major legal issues pertaining to transmission of digital assets on death.
• Virtual worlds players – consumers or citizens? – this CREATe working paper questions the preconceived notions that participants in virtual worlds are essentially consumers.
• Post-mortem Privacy, SCRIPTed 2013, Volume 10, Issue 1 – this special section on Post Mortem Privacy was curated by Lilian Edwards and Edina Harbinja. The issue contains:
  • Post-mortem Privacy – an editorial by Lilian Edwards
  • Access to the Digital Self in Life and Death: Privacy in the Context of Posthumously Persistent Facebook Profiles – an article by Elaine Kasket
  • Does the EU Data Protection Regime Protect Post-Mortem Privacy and What Could Be The Potential Alternatives? – an article by Edina Harbinja
  • Private But Eventually Public: Why Copyright in Unpublished Works Matters in the Digital Age – an article by Damien McCallig
  • Disaster Victim Identification in the Information Age: The Use Of Personal Data, Post-Mortem Privacy and the Rights of the Victim’s Relatives – an article by Jan Bikker