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Post by Prof. Derek McAuley

Coincidentally, five days after the publication of the Copyright Licensing Steering Group‘s report on the last 12 months of work on streamlining copyright, I was due to give a talk at a joint event of CREATe and the EPSRC funded Network of Excellence in Identity. The event “Identity Lost – electronic identity, digital orphan works and copyright law reform”, the talk “Digital tool chains; get your act together” – what joy to find the CLSG report, which lays down 10 key principles, formed the perfect frame to what I had planned to talk about! What should we do to avoid the on going creation of digital works that are orphans at birth?

Herewith the blogged version of the talk…

Metadata matters: encourage its use and preservation

I. By default create and preserve metadata

What is metadata in a digital image? Simply data attached to the digital image written by the camera when the image is created or afterwards as the image is processed by various tools. Nearly all cameras (including smartphones) capture information about the “camera” – lens, aperture, timing, resolution etc. – and the when and (especially with smartphones) the where. (More here.)

© Derek McAuley; not really sufficient…

Introduction by Lilian Edwards

Below is a blog written originally on the personal website of Prof Derek McAuley, head of the Horizon Digital Economy Hub and Doctoral Training Centre and lead for Nottingham as partner in CREATe. I have added a short new introduction to put into context why the work outlined below is an integral and vital part of the CREATe work programme.
Horizon is CREATe’s major partner looking at the creative industries’ problems from the viewpoint of technology and computing science. Specifically, Horizon took on the Herculean job of considering a number of interlocked problems. First, the Internet is obviously the source of, and platform for, much of the new creative and innovative activity in modern society. It clearly and brutally cannot be ignored by a Centre devoted to promoting the creative industries.

Acrobats Unemployed by Giulia Frances (http://giuliafrances.blogspot.co.uk/)

In a timely post in the Managing Culture section of the Tafter Journal, Pierre-Jean Benghozi and Elisa Salvador from Ecole Polytechnique Paris, argue that despite an increase in interest in the strategic and economic dimensions of creative industries (CIs) and their business models, the issue of managing R&D in the creative industries is severely neglected, with most organizations providing for poor investments in the R&D function. They cite innovations such as, the sound recording by Edison/ General Electric in the early 20th Century, the Walkman by Sony, and, the Appstore by Apple, where disruptive innovations strategically changing the landscape of a creative industry have come from outside the industry, and where creative firms have not managed to control their innovation. This has been attributed to poor investment in the R&D function within CIs.

Credit: Ghost Beach / www.artistsvsartists.com

What do musicians think of copyright? Do their views depend on whether they play jazz or rock? Or whether the issue is downloading or sampling? Are their views simply a product of commercial self-interest, or do politics and aesthetics mediate them?

In the future, readers will not go in search of books to read. Feral books will stalk readers, sneak into their ebook libraries, and leap out to ambush them. Readers will have to beat books off with a baseball bat; hold them at bay with a flaming torch: refuse to interact: and in extreme cases, feign dyslexia, blindness or locked-in syndrome to avoid being subjected to literature.

You think I’m exaggerating for effect, don’t you?

A new empirical study of so-called Orphan Works, commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office, and undertaken by academics from Bournemouth University, and the CREATe Centre at the University of Glasgow, comes to surprising results. It offers a clearer understanding of how orphan works are regulated and priced in other jurisdictions, and how a pricing system could be structured to ensure that “parents” are fairly remunerated if they re-appear, and users are incentivised to access and exploit registered orphan works.

Philip Schlesinger makes a correction and raises a new question. Hasan Bakhshi has written to correct my misquotation of the…

Professor Philip Schlesinger – Deputy Director, CREATe discusses the recently launched NESTA Manifesto for the Creative Economy. Update: see Schlesinger’s…

Much ado, even an air of conspiracy, surrounds the passing of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) on 25…

In his column published in The Bookseller on 15th February, Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, takes aim at CREATe, a new academic research centre investigating “copyright and new business models in the creative economy”.
According to Mollet, at least three things are wrong with CREATe: (1) The academics involved in CREATe are prejudiced in favour of copyright reform; (2) CREATe’s research programme ignores successful British companies; (3) More generally, academic research is unlikely to be helpful for creative businesses because academics lack direct experience of working in the sector. I will address these points in turn.

Professor Philip Schlesinger – Deputy Director, CREATe Contemporary cultural policy is made and implemented where culture, politics and the economy…

Lilian Edwards – Deputy Director CREATe Professor of E-Governance, University of Strathclyde Copyright was invented simultaneously to provide a revenue…

This is my first blogpost as director of CREATe, the RCUK centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the…