In this post, Amy Thomas (CREATe PhD candidate) analyses what she suspects to be the very first example of a software licensing agreement, and its relationship with copyright law.

Reprint Courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation, © (1969) International Business Machines Corporation.

In my PhD thesis, I am investigating how software licensing agreements (through their terms and conditions) reveal a particular concept of the user that has changed over time. I investigate this as a private ordering mechanism. As part of this study, a historical approach is required; to this end, I endeavoured to uncover the very first example of this type of private ordering mechanism in software (and to the extend it was primarily motivated by copyright concerns, as suspected).

The investigation was prompted by a memoir written by ex-IBM engineer, W.S. Humphrey (available here) which suggested that IBM may have been the first company to implement a software licensing system. In the memoir, Humphrey recalls being part of the process of “software unbundling” (e.g. the process of separating hardware from software), and was part of a task force established in 1966 to implement this.

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The European Copyright Society (an independent scholarly association to which several CREATe members contribute) has published two opinions regarding the CJEU cases C-161/17 Land Nordrhein Westfalen v. Dirk Renckhoff (the ‘Córdoba case’) and C-683/17 Cofemel v G-Star.

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Image credit: QuestLab Network residency at Studio Wayne McGregor, photos by Camilla Greenwell

Dr Elena Cooper, Leverhulme Fellow at CREATe, recently presented on Intellectual Property in the Collaborative Digital Environment as part of a programme for artists working with digital technology. The talk was delivered as part of an artists’ development initiative offered by Questlab Network, offered by Studio Wayne McGregor and funded by Arts Council England. It was held at Studio Wayne McGregor’s creative arts space at ‘Here East’ on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London from 22 October to 2 November 2018. Continue reading →

The Making Available Right: Realizing the Potential of Copyright’s Dissemination Function in the Digital Age.

Date: Friday 2 November 2018, 4PM

Venue: Room 207, 10 Professor’s Square

CREATe look forward to welcoming Dr. Cheryl Foong who is visiting us from Curtin Law School, Western Australia. Dr Foong’s presentation, The Making Available Right: Realizing the Potential of Copyright’s Dissemination Function in the Digital Age, will analyse the making available right as introduced by the WIPO Internet Treaties and evaluates current judicial approaches to the right in Australia, the US and the EU. It discusses the underlying justifications driving disparate decisions on the right, and reveals the pitfalls of existing approaches. Distilling lessons from current approaches, this presentation proposes principles for the interpretation of the making available right. These principles are aimed at aligning the development of the making available right with the vast communications potential afforded by the Internet.

Cheryl Foong is a Lecturer at Curtin Law School in Western Australia, where she teaches Intellectual Property law and Competition law. Cheryl publishes in the area of digital copyright, open access and internet law, and regularly speaks at national and international IP conferences. Cheryl has a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School in New York, and previously interned at the United States Copyright Office (Office of Policy and International Affairs) in Washington, DC. She is a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours graduate from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and recently completed her PhD at the Australian Catholic University.

To register for this event please visit Eventbrite.

Report by Daniel Pinheiro Astone

In the first of CREATe’s Autumn 2018 Public Lectures, Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp (Bournemouth University) presented her upcoming book, A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, co-edited with Professor Dan Hunter (Swinburne University of Technology). As Dr. Op den Kamp discussed, the book offers a jargon-free approach to IP by bringing together contributions from a multitude of academic fields. It is “an academic publication mixed with a coffee table book”, offering generous art-work and a range of stories from as early as the 12th century. The lecture took place on the 24th of October in Glasgow University’s Humanities Lecture Theatre, with Bartolomeo Meletti (CREATe, University of Glasgow) as chair.

Dr Claudy Op den Kamp (Bournemouth University) presenting her book in Glasgow

After several roundtable events, the editors selected the 50 objects that have helped to shape, and have been shaped by, human interactions. Each chapter uses the story of a broader notion of “object” (since it also comprises intangible things like the internet and the bitcoin), but also draws on the underlying impacts of their creation on IP in particular, and society as a whole. By adopting a user-friendly approach, the editors opted to provide several ways to read the book. Colour bars allow readers to follow objects through different IP ages, regimes, themes, or even navigate through images to retell the individual entries’ stories.

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The next workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) will be held at the University of Technology Sydney 4-6 July 2019. The theme of the workshop is ‘Law and the Visual’ and the call for papers may be found here. Abstracts are welcomed from scholars from any discipline who are researching the history and/or theory of IP. The deadline for abstract submission is 23 November 2018.

CREATe and its researchers have a longstanding affiliation with ISHTIP. CREATe members attend ISHTIP workshops regularly and CREATe itself hosted the workshop in 2016. A number of CREATe members attended the 2018 workshop, at the University of Roma Tre which included participation in a pre-event roundtable on histories of IP as told through a variety of objects.

The newest member of CREATe, Dr Marta Iljadica, who joined the School of Law at Glasgow in August of this year, also has strong connections with ISHTIP. She is a member of ISHTIP’s Governing Board and has previously participated as a discussant and as a presenter which informed work subsequently published in her monograph Copyright Beyond Law: Regulating Creativity in the Graffiti Subculture (Hart Publishing, 2016) as well as other work on social norms, copyright, and freedom of panorama.

The Global Congress is a unique forum that brings together every two years a global community of academics, non-governmental organisations and policy makers for a week long assessment of the state and direction of intellectual property policy. It is the foremost setting for exploring changing policy priorities from a public interest perspective.

Within this evidence-based framework, CREATe was reflecting on our own research agenda. We presented an overview of our work over the last five years (Empirical Approaches to Copyright Research, a panel with Prof. Martin Kretschmer, Dr Thomas Margoni and Bartolomeo Meletti), demonstrated resources (such as CopyrightUser.org and the Copyright Evidence wiki), discussed new research on takedown of online content and text-and-data-mining, and contributed to policy discussions. There was considerable interest whether the controversial provisions of the proposed EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (introducing new obligations on internet platforms) would set a global precedent. CREATe’s academic interventions relating to the Directive are seen as important and influential.

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The School of Law at the University of Glasgow is marking the introduction of the new Common Law Programme with an exciting launch programme on Friday 19 October 2018 from 15:00 – 19:00.

The event starts with a panel session including senior members of the judiciary, practitioners and academics on the tradition and evolution of the common law. Included on the panel is Sir Richard Arnold, who is a member of the CREATe Programme Advisory Council:

• Sir Richard Arnold: https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/mr-justice-arnold/
• Professor David Ormerod: http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/staff/ormerod.html
• Professor Cally Jordan: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/cally-jordan
• Sir William Blair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blair_(judge)
• Professor John Cairns: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/johnwcairns
• Dr Julian Farrand QC
• Panel Chair: Professor Andreas Rahmatian

Lady Hale will give the keynote address at 4.30pm and the event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Register for the event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/common-law-launch-registration-50533838070 

Following the vote in the EU Parliament on 11 September, our EU Copyright Reform resource has been updated to include:

• A full transcription of the Plenary Discussion on 11 September, available to download
• A comparision table including the original Commission Proposal, a translation of the Proposal, the Agreed Council Position, the Rejected JURI Position, the Agreed Parliamentary Position, Unsuccessful amendments proposed by MEP Marietje Schaake. Documents are available to download
• An updated log of European and International media coverage

Our timeline tracking the legislative process has been kept up to date, and the resource includes a range of policy evidence including academic statements, open letters and video clips of parliamentary speeches.