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 →

By Methinee Suwannakit and Amy Thomas (CREATe PhD Candidates)

BILETA (The British and Irish Law Education Technology Association) was formed to promote the research and knowledge on technology law and policy. This year’s conference was held on 16-17 April 2019 at Queen’s University Belfast, with the theme ‘Back to the futures: law without frontiers?’. This posed important questions: how will legal systems engage with technological developments and anticipate future directions? How will privacy and security issues be addressed? This post focusses on highlights from the plenary sessions in IP and data protection/privacy.

Intellectual Property

Eliza Easton’s (Nesta/PEC) keynote speech on the creative industries and work of the PEC.

Eliza Easton’s (Nesta/PEC) keynote speech opened the conference with an overview of the PEC’s five areas of work, including CREATe’s leading role in ‘IP, Business Models, Access to Finance and Content Regulation’. Her speech emphasized the need for independent research to contribute to the success of the UK’s creative industries in order to address imminent policy questions: what do new and successful business models look like and how are these developed? How do we regulate the platform economy? Many of the conference plenary sessions touched on these matters.

Perhaps most notably on the subject of the platform economy, IP discussions centred on addressing the potential impact of Article 17 (Draft Article 13) of the impending Copyright Directive. From a human rights perspective, Felipe Romero Moreno (University of Hertfordshire) proposed to analyse Article 17 using the three-part test of the ECtHR; Ruth Flaherty (University of East Anglia) instead approached this from the perspective of fan communities, and how unauthorized derivative uses may be undervalued by this new provision. Continue reading →

On 6-7 May 2019, I attended the first meeting of the Law and Technology Consortium (LTC), held at the University of Trento (Italy). LTC is an international and informal consortium of research centres and institutions seeking to establish a collaborative network and share scientific knowledge and expertise in the field of law and technology. Coordinated by Prof. Roberto Caso (University of Trento) and Prof. Gideon Parchomovsky (University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the Consortium aims to facilitate research collaboration and mutual exchange of experiences on research topics related to law and technology.

View from the University of Trento, Faculty of Law

During the first day of the meeting, I presented an idea paper titled ‘The Game is On! – Lawful copying under UK copyright law’. The paper aims to investigate how different forms of lawful copying have evolved under UK copyright law over the last few years, examining the role that creative practice can play in defining the scope of permitted acts. Following the introduction in 2014 of new fair dealing exceptions for quotation and for caricature, parody or pastiche, the scope of lawful copying within UK copyright law has expanded considerably. Before 2014, only two exceptions allowed creators to deliberately reuse protected works for their own creative and artistic purposes: criticism or review (s30 CDPA) and what is commonly referred to as ‘freedom of panorama’ (s62 CDPA, ‘Representation of certain artistic works on public display’). These exceptions offer limited artistic freedom though: criticism or review is limited by purpose (you can benefit from it only if the reason for using the protected material is genuinely for the purpose of criticism or review), whereas s62 only applies to certain types of work (buildings, sculptures, models for buildings and works of artistic craftmanship on public display) and use (it only allows making a graphic work representing the protected material, a photograph or a film of it, or making a broadcast of a visual image of it). Under the new quotation exception provided by s30(1ZA) CDPA, you can quote from any type of copyright work ‘for criticism or review or otherwise’. As such, quotation is the first ever UK fair dealing exceptions that – similarly to the fair use doctrine in the US – is not limited by purpose. On the other hand, the exception for caricature, parody or pastiche (s30A CDPA) is limited by purpose, but the purpose itself, in particular pastiche, is a creative one. You can use other people’s works for the purpose of creating a pastiche of those works. With the introduction of these two fair dealing exceptions, now UK copyright law potentially allows creative practices based on the reuse of existing materials and for which the rights clearance mechanisms are not suitable or unrealistic because of the numerous, low value uses involved (e.g. appropriation art, found footage filmmaking, mash up videos, memes, among many others).

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