Monthly Archives

March 2016

CREATe Litigation Research: a Knowledge Exchange Workshop

By News

This workshop covers research on litigation of intellectual property rights in the UK. The main focus is on litigation of copyright and patent related cases. Presenters are associated with the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) and an ongoing Knowledge Exchange project Assessing the Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court. 

 The workshop will consist of a mix of presentations and discussions of recent research on copyright and patent litigation as well as ongoing work to create a database of copyright litigation cases and a Wiki summarising copyright related evidence, both of which will be hosted on CREATe’s internet platform.


Download details of this workshop, including the full programme and venue information (PDF format, 552 KB).


On April 13th we will get together with the British Literary & Artistic Copyright Association (BLACA) to launch a CREATe study recently published in the Modern Law Review: “Is There a EU Copyright Jurisprudence? An Empirical Analysis of the Workings of the European Court of Justice” (details below).

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CREATe Studio: Spring/Summer Lecture Series

By News

CREATe Studiostudio-speakers is delighted to announce an exciting series of Intellectual Property lectures for Spring/Summer 2016. In April, we welcome Dr Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, an anthropologist from the University of Oxford, who will speak about her ethnographic field-work, reflecting on the impact of the criminalisation of copyright infringement on street-traders in Brazil. Then, in May, Dr Yahong Li, of the University of Hong Kong, will present her research commissioned by the Hong Kong Government about user generated content and fair use, situating it within broader social and cultural changes and the relation between Hong Kong and Mainland China. Finally, in July, Prof. Barton Beebe of New York University, will reflect on the complex position of ‘aesthetic progress’ in the IP clause of the US Constitution. For further details of each of these talks, please see below.

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Ready to use your free Spotify UK account in France?

By Media Briefings, Working papers

If you have a free Spotify account in the UK, you cannot use it in France for more than 14 days. If you have a premium account from UK, you can listen only to that music which has been licensed in the UK, even if you are physically in France. This results from the way music rights are licensed or sold as per territories. In an attempt to shake up the copyright regime in Europe and to allow Europeans to access their online services wherever they go, the EU is now reforming the system by which music rights are licensed. It is doing so by bringing competition to the business of collective rights management through the EU’s Directive on CMOs (Collective Management Organizations) due to be implemented in April 2016. It requires CMOs to compete with each other for members (the right holders they represent) and to become transparent in the way they operate.

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Some Challenges of ‘Keeping Personal Data Personal’

By Blog

priceDominic Price, Horizon Digital Economy Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham describes some of the difficulties faced by his team in their attempts to develop systems that empower users to control their own data.


One of the key themes in Horizon, since it started 5+ years ago, has been ‘keeping personal data personal’. What we’ve tended to mean by this is that an individual should retain all the rights to the digital data that they produce (social media content, data from smart meters in the home, data from activity loggers, and so on) and that the individual should be the ultimate gatekeeper of access to that data. This simple idea is a reversal of the way that most current service providers implement their systems, the usual method is that user data is uploaded to the service providers servers and the service provider then maintains and controls access to that data.

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