On 8th-10th October of this year at the University of Glasgow, CREATe will be celebrating the beginning of a variety of ambitious projects funded by the AHRC as part of the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, the Leverhulme Trust, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

The draft program for the symposium highlights CREATe’s ongoing interdisciplinary approach to copyright law and policy. It ranges from an emerging researchers workshop showcasing the great variety of work undertaken by CREATe doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, to a discussion of the continuing relevance of copyright history to current policy, to a public lecture by Catherine Stihler, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation, longstanding former Member of the European Parliament, and joint Rapporteur for the highly contested Article 13 (now Article 17) of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. In between, we will be unveiling a Whistler painting last seen in public in the nineteenth century as well as beta versions of two new copyright resources: Online Media Behaviour (OMeBa) and the Copyright Evidence Portal.

The symposium events are all free to attend and we hope to foster discussion with policy makers, academics and members of the public as we head into this new and exciting phase of CREATe research. Join us!

GSA interior wall decorative detail by Charles Rennie Mackintosh  CC-BY

To view the full Wiki click here or the image above.

This is part of a series of summary posts rounding-up new entries to the Copyright Evidence Wiki (organised thematically). As part of CREATe’s workstream for the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, the Wiki catalogues empirical studies on copyright. This month, we summarise new featured studies on: Piracy, Copyright and Libraries, and Fair Remuneration. Continue reading →

Post by Janet Burgess, PhD researcher at CREATe

Photo by Anne-Lise Harding

Just back from Edinburgh and the very informative, and entertaining, Icepops 2019 (or ‘International Copyright-Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars’ to give it its full pedigree).  Devised and run by the dynamic duo, Jane Secker and Chris Morrison from UK Copyright Literacy, with CREATe as one of its sponsors, it aims to promote copyright literacy through fun and imaginative means, and it certainly lived up to its own high standards.  Full details of this year’s programme are available here but included music-related copyright issues, expertly outlined by keynote speaker Dr Simon Anderson from Audio Network (who gave a CREATe Public Lecture in Glasgow in 2017, contributed to the Copyright User resource Going for a Song, and was also instrumental in setting up the Lost in Music resource).

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Institute of Art & Law

Dr Elena Cooper (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, CREATe) recently presented aspects of her book – Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (CUP 2018) – to an audience mainly comprising art curators and art gallery registrars at a Study Forum in London organised by the Institute of Art and Law, an internationally recognised society which promotes knowledge and education in all aspects of law relating to art. Dr Cooper’s presentation used examples of the work of two artists which featured in mid-nineteenth century copyright debates – Thomas Faed and Abraham Solomon – as a way into exploring the complex inter-relation between copyright law, aesthetics and the commerce of culture in past times, before discussing the relevance of the past to the way we think about copyright today. Other papers at the Study Forum looked at the legal issues raised by art loans (Emily Gould, Institute of Art and Law) and international law concerning the return of cultural heritage (Alexander Herman, Institute of Art and Law), amongst other topics. More details about the Study Forum can be found here: https://ial.uk.com/events/studyforum-29june19/

For more information on Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image see launch details here and book reviews here.

Crystal Palace at Hyde Park – Wellcome Collection – CC BY.

Dr Elena Cooper and Dr Marta Iljadica, both of CREATe, recently presented a co-authored paper, Architectural Copyright, Painters and Rights to Public Space in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain, at an interdisciplinary conference held at Columbia University’s Institute in Paris. The conference, jointly organised by Dr Will Slauter, Université Paris Diderot, and Dr Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, Winterhur Museum, Delaware, USA, drew together art curators and scholars from a wide range of disciplines (law, art history, history and photography) and jurisdictions (USA, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, France and the UK). Each paper examined a different facet of the law as it applied to the ‘image revolutions’ of the nineteenth century, for example press photography, typography and photographic portraits. The paper presented by Cooper and Iljadica, explored tensions between architects and painters in the mid-nineteenth century debate of proposals for the protection of three-dimensional works of architecture. At stake in these debates, were competing perspectives about the nature of public space and its experience; early forerunners to the ‘right to the city’ were on both sides of the mid-nineteenth century architectural copyright debate, both the notion that architectural copyright would improve public experience of architecture, and the opposition by painters on the basis that image making is part of the discourse of representing the city. The paper will also be presented at the forthcoming annual workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property in Sydney, Australia in July 2019.

CopyrightX: Glasgow class 2019.
Image credit: GU-IPS.

Copyright X is an intensive twelve-week networked course that has been offered annually since 2013 under the auspices of Harvard Law School, the HarvardX distance-learning initiative and the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society. As part of the affiliate course community, CopyrightX: Glasgow (coordinated by Dr. Thomas Margoni and Amy Thomas) joins around 20 other countries in delivering the affiliate course since 2017.

This year’s group of enthusiastic LLM students engaged in lively discussions on copyright law, theory and practice in weekly meetings. Hailing from a variety of international backgrounds, students also provided interesting insights from their own jurisdictions, allowing them to compare, contrast and better assess the global copyright landscape. These efforts culminated in a group project examining the right of Communication to the Public, where students presented their own research and posed several important questions: how should we interpret the ambiguous definition of “public”? What is the relationship between the knowledge criteria and direct or indirect liability? What are the implications of the BGH Thumbnail III decision? Continue reading →

Post by the authors of The Game is On! – Prof. Ronan Deazley (Queen’s University Belfast) and Bartolomeo Meletti (CREATe, University of Glasgow)

The UK Intellectual Property Office, on their educational portal Cracking Ideas, has published a new teaching resource based on The Game is On! The new resource represents the latest stage of a genuine, long-standing collaboration between university, industry and government.

The Game is On! on crackingideas.com

It was the 11 April 2014, on a train from Bournemouth to London, when the idea for The Game is On! first began to take shape. We had just attended a Public Domain Calculators workshop at Bournemouth University, organised by CIPPM as part of their annual symposium, and were travelling to London to attend the launch of the CREATe study on Unlawful File Sharing at the Stationers’ Hall. The train trip itself became a copyright event: we dubbed it ‘The Public Domain Train’. Not only did the train journey fall hard on the heels of a workshop on the public domain in Bournemouth, it also provided us with the opportunity to storyboard Copyright Bites, a series of short animated videos that explore the relationship between copyright and the public domain. The Copyright Bites were part of a suite of materials we were producing following the official launch of CopyrightUser.org at the AHRC Creative Economy Showcase event on 12 March 2014, where we also distributed the Copyright Myth-Reality Cards for the first time. In developing Copyright Bites we uncovered a shared passion for the Sherlock Holmes canon, and in doing so stumbled upon our first iteration of the great detective – Sherlock Holmes, resplendent in pink, designed by Davide Bonazzi. We had just joined an ever-growing community, formed by the countless creators who have produced new editions, adaptations and imitations of Holmes.

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To view the full Wiki click here or the image above.

This is part of a series of summary posts rounding-up new entries to the Copyright Evidence Wiki (organised thematically). As part of CREATe’s workstream for the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, the Wiki catalogues empirical studies on copyright. This month, we summarise new studies on: Negative Space and Copyright and Game of Thrones.

Negative Space:

A study by Sarid (2014) details the difficulty in protecting drag queen performances with copyright, and how the community has instead come to regulate itself through “gentlewoman’s understandings” and an enforcement system of boycotts, professional isolation and humiliation for transgressors. The author suggests that part of the community’s hesitation to engage with copyright is due to the overarching message of the drag queen community itself – namely to challenge mainstream conventions (rather than codifying norms in hard law). Continue reading →