In 2023 CREATe received a major Infrastructure award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to enhance the UK’s knowledge infrastructure for evidence-based policy in digital regulation. The project will run for 5 years from October 2023 to October 2028. The total funding contribution from AHRC is £1.1m, with additional matched commitments from the University of Glasgow College of Social Science and College of Arts and Humanities. The Principal Investigator is Professor Martin Kretschmer, Director of CREATe and Professor of Intellectual Property Law. Co-Investigators are Magali Eben (Deputy Director CREATe), Kristofer Erickson (Deputy Director CREATe), Tim Barker (College of Arts), Elena Cooper, Ula Furgal, Bartolomeo Meletti, Luis Porangaba, Philip Schlesinger (College of Arts and former Deputy Director, CREATe), Konstantinos Stylianou, and Amy Thomas.
About the Award
Interim Report (October 2023 – September 2025)
As part of our commitment to transparency and sector engagement, the Interim Report outlines the project’s progress from October 2023 to September 2025, including key activities, outputs, and next steps.
Activities
CREATe is delivering this project across three main pillars of activity: (1) Digital tools and resources, (2) Policy and stakeholder engagement, and (3) Infrastructure and capacity building.
Digital tools and resources: The award enables CREATe to build upon its existing suite of public facing digital resources, which collectively reach over 250,000 visitors per year. These are: Copyrightuser.org, a learning resource aimed at creators and small businesses with up-to-date and accurate information about UK copyright law, intended for a practitioner audience; Copyrightuser.eu, the sister site that covers copyright issues in the EU context, with helpful graphics and visualisations to promote understanding of copyright and exceptions; Copyrightevidence.org, a data-mineable repository of empirical research about copyright’s economic effects, this resource now hosts over 900 studies in a structured data format enabling extraction and visualisation across key variables such as sector and time period; Copyrighthistory.org is a multi-country repository of early primary evidence about copyright and related laws from 1450-1900, containing high-resolution scans of archival documents, transcriptions, translations and commentary, compiled by over 25 partners around the world.
The AHRC infrastructure award will enable the team to upgrade and enhance these resources, making them more useful and more discoverable to a wider range of stakeholders. We will further increase the diversity and range of content across all the sites and ensure they remain up-to-date, interoperable and accessible.
Policy and stakeholder engagement: The AHRC award will further enable CREATe to share research with regulators to improve policy making in technology and creative industries. The funding will be used to open sustainable lines of communication and information sharing opened between practitioners, researchers and regulators. Specifically, the award will enable CREATe to submit substantive policy consultations based on empirical research (for a recent example see our response to the DCRF call on AI regulation here). The award will also support the continued publication of the CREATe Working Paper series, which seeks to disseminate cutting edge research on a rapid publication timeline to enable uptake and use by stakeholders.
Under the leadership of our new Head of Knowledge Exchange Bartolomeo Meletti, we will also undertake bespoke copyright training and knowledge exchange activities in major institutions (such as the British Library, British Film Institute and Creative Commons organisation). These institutional relationships provide pathways to impact for CREATe research but also facilitate new research projects and co-production of knowledge with non-academic stakeholders.
Infrastructure and capacity building: CREATe will continue to develop knowledge infrastructure for evidence-based policy making in two main areas. First, the award is supporting development of digital knowledge tools to improve interoperability and discoverability of data and information across our digital infrastructure. We are developing in-house knowledge graph capabilities, enhanced by artificial intelligence, to provide cross-referencing capabilities to our digital resources (copyrightevidence.org, copyrightuser.org, copyrighthistory.org). We will be adding new open datasets and visualisation tools to our existing resources (for example, see the MAME video game explorer tool or the Copyright Evidence visualisation dashboard tool). Our objective is for this experience developing open knowledge infrastructure to assist other UK institutions and centres by serving as a methodological guide of best practice. In addition to digital infrastructure, we will be developing human capacity by training a new generation of emerging early-career scholars in interdisciplinary research methods and approaches to evidence-based policy. This will be accomplished through an annual Spring School, as well as regular open PhD training events and workshops.
Research Themes
With this new award, we have widened the research focus of CREATe to become the Centre for Regulation of the Digital Economy. This new structure emerges from recognition of the interconnected nature of the creative economy, the confluence of overlapping regulatory domains in individual products and services, and a need to be responsive to unpredictable technological change. Recognising the interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral nature of the challenges facing policy makers, our research encompasses an overlapping focus on creativity, markets and technology (see figure 1 above). Our digital resources, policy engagement and capacity building each include concern for all of these domains. For example, our research into the effects of generative AI for creative industries includes not only interviews and surveys with creators, but also analysis of markets, hands-on experiments using technology, and embedded engagement with policy, to better understand causal relationships and future trends.
Our research portfolio is organised under seven themes: Automation, decentralisation and platforms, Access to knowledge, Dealing with creators, Political economy of regulation, The law of innovation, Legal history and cultural memory, and Technology and humanism. Find out more about each theme from the co-investigators involved in the short video presentations below.
Launch Event Resources
On Monday 11th of March, CREATe hosted a re-launch event in the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Glasgow. The event was an opportunity for CREATe to publicly share its agenda for the next five years, supported by the new AHRC award. View the full launch event programme here.
Speeches were made by The Principal of the University of Glasgow, Sir Anton Muscatelli, Prof Martin Kretschmer, Director of CREATe, Tao-Tao Chang, Associate Director, Infrastructure & Major Programmes, AHRC, Sara Carter, Vice-Principal and Head of College of Social Sciences, Jo Gill, Vice-Principal and Head of College of Arts and Humanities and Claire McDiarmid, Head of School of Law.
The launch also included a roundtable discussion with regulators Ofcom, CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) and the Intellectual Property Office about new modes of regulation, the formal and informal coordination of responsibilities between regulators, and the UK’s geopolitical positioning for the next five years.
The launch also included a roundtable discussion with regulators Ofcom, CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) and the Intellectual Property Office about new modes of regulation, the formal and informal coordination of responsibilities between regulators, and the UK’s geopolitical positioning for the next five years.
The launch event ended with a keynote and conversation with Professor Anu Bradford (Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia University, New York), in conversation with Dr Magali Eben, Deputy Director of CREATe, and Dr Ula Furgał, Managing Editor, CREATe research paper series.
Confronting the challenges of digital regulation responsibly requires a holistic approach and that diverse voices are at the table. Professor Bradford’s keynote vividly illustrated that regulators, authorities and courts worldwide have to consider the impacts of global technology in the context of their local or regional priorities. These objectives tend to be diverse and interlinked – requiring an approach which marries the insights and tools of various areas of law and various disciplines.
click the image for the keynote slides
Statements about the re-launch of CREATe and the award:
The University is very proud to host the UK Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy (CREATe), which was one of the first large Centre investments by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Since its inception in 2012/13, CREATe has transformed the evidence base for copyright regulation and has strengthened interdisciplinary research across the fields of law, technology, creative industries and market regulation. In this era of Artificial Intelligence, advanced technologies and shifting regulatory landscapes, it is essential that Centres like CREATe are providing the robust evidence needed to inform policymaking and to support the creative industries.
– Prof. Sir Anton Muscatelli, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow
Twelve years ago, we were part of the first round of major Centre investments led by the AHRC. The Arts and Humanities were beginning to think of national centres with a policy dimension. We were, and I think still are, the only Centre that has received cross research council funding, from AHRC, EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences), and ESRC (Economic and Social Sciences). And today, we are celebrating another first. We are now considered to be part of the UK’s essential research infrastructure, with core funding for another 5 years. This is another first for the AHRC, and we are proud of and grateful for the support and vote of confidence.
– Prof. Martin Kretschmer, Director, CREATe and Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Glasgow
There is an urgent need for an evidence-based legal and regulatory understanding of digital technologies such as AI that underpin our national strategies and key economic sectors such as the creative industries. CREATe contributes significant research to deliver expert advice to creators and innovators who wish to act responsibly and effectively in this rapidly moving environment.
– Dr Allan Sudlow, Director of Partnerships and Engagement, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
