Monthly Archives: March 2018

Why do people pirate or stream media unlawfully? This question was investigated by Daniel Zizzo and Piers Fleming, and summarised for the Research Blog Series. Projects: Sharing, Streaming, Stealing or Socialising? and A field Experiment of Detriments of Unlawful file sharing Investigators: Dr Piers Fleming (UEA), Professor Daniel John Zizzo (Newcastle University) What did your research aim to do? Media companies are very concerned about piracy and encourage significant punishments for accessing, storing or distributing music, films etc. They estimate that it costs billions of dollars a year to the media industry. We wanted to find out why people pirate or stream media unlawfully. Is it the cost, the accessibility or something else? How did you do it? We carried out a … Continue reading →

Jeremy Silver presents research from his working paper on some technology issues at the heart of blockchain and possible opportunities for the music industry, for the Research Blog Series. Project: Blockchain or the Chaingang? Challenges, opportunities and hype: the music industry and blockchain technologies Investigator: Dr Jeremy Silver (CEO of Digital Catapult and CREATe Industry fellow) What did your research aim to do? My working paper looked at how bitcoin and blockchain captured the public imagination, some of the technology issues at the heart of blockchain and a key dispute taking the bitcoin community in different directions with a bearing on possible music applications. I explored the kinds of initially superficial ways in which blockchain represented an attractive technology to the music industry … Continue reading →

For the Research Blog Series, Lilian Edwards writes on the research exploring how ownership and control of cultural assets produced by users on social media sites are regulated by copyright and contract law. Projects: User Generated Cultural Content (UGCC): Users as Creators, “Walled Gardens”, and the Preservation and Bequeathing of Novel Digital Cultural Assets, Investigators: Lilian Edwards, University of Strathclyde, Edina Harbinja, (now University of Hertfordshire) with RA Laurence Diver, Edinburgh University (on Memento Mori) What did your research aim to do? We aimed to examine how ownership and control of cultural assets produced by users on social media sites – text, photos, videos etc – are regulated by copyright and contract law. We also looked at two other key sites where cultural or copyright … Continue reading →

Morten Hviid presents research on the impact of digitisation on the book, music and video games industries and the interaction between creators and new digital platforms, for the Research Blog Series.  Project: Intermediaries Investigators: Morten Hviid (UEA), Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez (University of Huddersfield), Sabine Jacques (UEA). Project initially led by Emily Laidlaw (University of Calgary) What did your research aim to do? The purpose of this project was to investigate the structure of selected creative industries, in particular the relationship between content creators, traditional intermediaries and platforms, to determine whether the current ecosystem maximises creativity and economic growth. To do so, we decided to focus on three key industries: books, music, and video games. Firstly, we map out the impact of digitalisation on … Continue reading →

Kicking off the theme of Intermediaries, Platforms and Users for the Research Blog Series, Philip Schlesinger sets out the research into the cultural business support intermediary. Project: Supporting creative business: Cultural Enterprise Office and its clients (A Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange Project). Investigators: Professor Philip Schlesinger (PI), Dr Melanie Selfe (Co-I), Dr Ealasaid Munro (PDRA), the University of Glasgow. What did your research aim to do? The research aimed to undertake the first major detailed study of a cultural business support intermediary. How did you do it? A primary method was team ethnography in Cultural Enterprise Office. This was complemented by extensive access to the organisation’s documentation and a range of interviews with its clients, staff and the mentors used for training.

In the final Research Blog Series post on the theme of Regulation & Enforcement, Kris Erickson presents the resource making copyright studies more accessible. Project:  The Copyright Evidence Wiki How can policy makers and academics engage with the growing body of empirical work on the effects of copyright law? The Copyright Evidence Wiki addresses this challenge by cataloguing and indexing studies in an open, transparent and accessible resource. The project was undertaken by the RCUK funded CREATe centre, and further supported by a grant from the Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) at the University of Glasgow. The current phase of the Copyright Evidence Wiki is supported by AHRC Follow-on Funding for ‘Unlocking Co–Creative Possibilities‘ (AH/P013341/1). Investigators: The Impact Acceleration Account award was held … Continue reading →

Richard Danbury sets out findings from research evaluating the legal options to address the threats to the business models of commercial news production, for the Research Blog Series. Project: Appraising Potential Legal Responses to Threats to the Production of News in a Digital Environment Investigators: The principal investigator was Professor Lionel Bently of CIPIL (University of Cambridge), collaborating with Professor Ian Hargreaves of Cardiff University. The research associate was Dr Richard Danbury (CIPIL). What did your research aim to do? The business models of commercial news production have been seriously undermined by various mechanisms, not least digitisation and the development of the Internet. Copyright has been repeatedly suggested as being a potential solution for news organisations in many different countries. Indeed, while the research was on-going, the … Continue reading →

Richard Paterson presents his research on the changing Business Models of TV Drama production companies, for the Research Blog Series. Project: Modelling the Evolution of the TV Drama production sector in the UK Investigator: Richard Paterson, British Film Institute The project was initiated to follow up on research carried out in the late 1990s which tracked the individual careers of creative workers in UK television through a series of questionnaires over a four year period. The subsequent analysis of this data indicated another issue of increasing importance: the ways in which the business models of ‘independent’ production companies were changing. I continued tracking these changes in the subsequent period and with the Fellowship was able both to amass further data … Continue reading →

Luke McDonagh presents the project that investigated cases on copyright heard at the High Court and Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, for the Research Blog Series. Project: Copyright Litigation in the English Courts 2009-2015: Data and Analysis Investigators:  Primary Investigator: Georg von Graevenitz, Queen Mary University of London Co-Investigator: Luke McDonagh, City University of London Senior Research Assistant: Leslie Lansman, Queen Mary University of London Research Assistant: Thomas Loukaris-Kapnidis, Independent researcher What did your research aim to do? In 2015 CREATe agreed to facilitate this project to develop a dataset containing the details of all court cases on copyright heard at the High Court (HC) during 2009-2015 and at the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) from the same period, 2009-2015. The project team aimed to collect data on copyright litigation from the paper records held at the HC and … Continue reading →