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Andrew McHugh

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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Event Perspective: Fashion Exchange – London-Berlin – Dialogue – Young Designers and Creative Economy

By News

CREATe Researcher Dr. Bettina Springer describes a recent event exploring the future politics and economics of the fashion scenes in Berlin and London.


On Monday 22 February 2016 leading fashion designers and entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists and academics from Berlin and London met for the “Fashion Exchange – London-Berlin – Dialogue – Young Designers and Creative Economy” at the British Council Berlin. The event was jointly organized by Prof Angela McRobbie from Goldsmiths and Prof Oliver MacConnell from the bbw Hochschule Berlin.

image1About 50 people attended the event to discuss the future politics and economics of Berlin and London fashion scene.

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CREATe Working Paper: Copying, Creativity and Copyright

By Media Briefings, Working papers

Ronan Deazley of Queen’s University Belfast and Bartolomeo Meletti, CREATe researcher and Lead Producer of CopyrightUser.org introduce their CREATe Working Paper entitled ‘Copying, Creativity and Copyright‘.


Copying and creativity are often presented in antithetical terms: if you are copying you are not being creative, and vice versa. And within the context of copyright law, copying is often conflated with concepts like theft, piracy and immorality: to copy is to attack creators trying to make a living from their work. But in truth, copying can be and often is creative. The creative process thrives upon practices of adaptation, imitation and borrowing, and copyright should and does accommodate those creative practices. The short animated film The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair – which on 12 November 2015 won the AHRC Research in Film Award for Innovation in Film – provides a practical example of how copyright enables and encourages many forms of lawful, creative copying. In less than four minutes, the film includes over 80 instances of the lawful reuse of and reference to well-known copyright and public domain works, as well as factual information and recent copyright litigation.

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Leading Creative Industry figures appointed as CREATe Industry Fellows

By Media Briefings, News

industry-fellowsCREATe has appointed its first three Industry Fellows in a scheme established to further develop and deepen connections between CREATe and its industrial partners and stakeholders. Emma Barraclough, Richard Paterson and Jeremy Silver will each work in collaboration with CREATe over a period of several months. CREATE will disseminate their outputs. The call for participation required applicants to submit a short project proposal that involved a reflection on and analysis of a topic of pressing importance or of future significance for the creative economy.

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Event Summary: Concepts and Methods in a Cross Sectoral Frame

By News

mcrobbieAngela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London describes a recent event exploring methods and themes in creative industries research.


The Goldsmiths/CREATe event last week (January 13th) titled ‘Concepts and Methods in a Cross-Sectoral Frame’, had the aim of encouraging invited speakers to discuss the methodologies they were working with, with a view to exchanging perspectives on the issues arising, especially those that were especially challenging. A key dynamic for the afternoon was to have one panel present topics relating to quantitative methods, followed by a panel which reflected specifically on themes emerging from CREATe work drawing on qualitative approaches. We also wanted to bring a number of the CREATe researchers together in order to initiate a debate about future directions for the creative industries.

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New CREATe Associated Project Assesses Business Models in Film, Music and e-fiction publishing in China

By Media Briefings, News

Associated project

CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (www.create.ac.uk – based at the University of Glasgow), is funding an overview project of business models in film, music and e-fiction publishing, in order to enable a comparative perspective between developments in China and the UK.

Project description

Convergence or differentiation in IP protection? A case study of new models for digital film, music and e-fiction production and distribution in China

This project examines the emergence of new models for digital film, music and e-fiction production and distribution in China focusing on the role of internet businesses and platforms in film, music and e-fiction production and distribution. The research started in December 2015 for one year, and is led by Dr Xiaobai Shen (Edinburgh), with Co-Is Prof. Martin Kretschmer (Glasgow) and Prof. Robin Williams (Edinburgh).

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