Author Archives: Kristofer Erickson

In this guest blog post, CREATe Fellow Kris Erickson (former director of postgraduate research at CREATe) discusses findings from his recently published study, which explores how creative firms use free and open materials to generate value. An enduring puzzle has animated my research for a number of years: ‘what inspires people to contribute their labour to an online community, when they don’t directly benefit from that contribution?’. We’ve seen people do this all over the web, on old-school discussion forums, news aggregators like Reddit, and social networking services like twitter.  The collective labour of online communities generates $ billions in revenue for platforms that do little more than provide an opportunity for communities to share their work with one another. In … Continue reading →

CREATe member and School of Law colleague Kristofer Erickson will present research at Loyola University Chicago School of Law on Friday 15th September. The title of Dr Erickson’s presentation, which emerges from research with colleagues Martin Kretschmer and Dinusha Mendis, funded by the UK Intellectual Property Office, is ‘Assessing the impact of derivative works: Evidence from the removal of music video parodies on YouTube’. The project examines rightsholder behavior by analysing the factors that contribute to a request to remove user-generated parody videos from YouTube. The new paper includes data about the takedown rate from our original sample, added in 2016 by CREATe collaborators Sabine Jacques and Morten Hviid at the University of East Anglia. The public lecture will take … Continue reading →

On 23rd June, Bournemouth University will host a Symposium on New Approaches to the Orphan Works Problem. A limited number of spaces are still available for those wishing to participate in the event, which will include presentations by Peter Jaszi, Dan Hunter and Meredith Jacob. CREATe researchers Victoria Stobo and Kris Erickson will also present new research arising from interviews with cultural heritage institutions in Italy, The Netherlands and the UK, as well as from the Digitising Morgan project at the University of Glasgow. The purpose of the symposium is to evaluate recent legislative interventions such as the EU Orphan Works Directive of 2012. A wealth of new empirical data such as those gathered in the first phase of the … Continue reading →

Early career researchers, PhD students and faculty are welcome to come along to the following upcoming workshop events in CREATe. On Tuesday 14th February 2017 from 3:30pm to 5:30 pm, we will be discussing Methods for investigating digital platforms: algorithms and affordances. The purpose of this workshop is to share and discuss techniques and methodological challenges related to investigating creative industries activity in online settings. CREATe researchers will share recent research design processes for investigating behavior on YouTube, Amazon and Kickstarter. Attendees are encouraged to bring specific questions related to their own online research challenges for group discussion. The recommended readings linked on the events page here provide context and theoretical underpinning for understanding the ‘method as the message’ in … Continue reading →

A limited number of spaces have opened up for a workshop on algorithms and law organised by Professor Lilian Edwards at the University of Strathclyde. PhD students and early career researchers are invited to take part in the event, which will take place on 15th February from 12:30-17:00h. Speakers include Professor Lillian Edwards (Strathclyde), Michael Veale (UCL), Lorna Woods (Essex), Freddie Borgesius (Amsterdam) and Thomas Höppner (Berlin). The workshop will consider the legal, social and technical dimensions of algorithms and their role in governance. As we move further towards network-connected material life described as the ‘Internet of Things’, the status of algorithms as mechanisms for regulating social activity becomes evermore important. The afternoon session will discuss possible remedies to the … Continue reading →