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Dr Simone Schroff, CREATe/University of East Anglia explores how Collective Management Organisations are responding to pressures to offer more clarity about how they operate. 

Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) perform a key role in the commercial exploitation of music. They license its use, collect the revenues and then distribute these to the copyright owners. As a result, the CMOs link both the copyright owners and users at one of the key stages that copyright is designed to facilitate: the commercial exploitation of the work, generating the revenue that is seen as essential for future creation and innovation. In a digital era, the CMO has become an increasingly important player. And because they are typically monopolies (only in a few territories – the US, South Korea – do CMOs compete with each other), there has been a growing demand for transparency in the way they operate, including the administrative structures, licensing schemes and distribution policies.

Philip Schlesinger, Professor in Cultural Policy, University of Glasgow and Deputy Director, CREATe

This post was originally presented as the closing paper in the final session ‘Where have we been and what next?’, of CREATe’s first All Hands Conference at House for an Art Lover, Glasgow on 16th September 2014

This evening, I’ve been asked to broach the topic of the ‘public intellectual’. While it’s the subject of much definitional wrangling, this term nevertheless signals something about how, by virtue of actions directed towards a general public, the battle for ideas and influence achieves a wide resonance.

There are at least two dimensions to this. One is the achievement of reach – expanding the range of those who can be addressed by our work.

And a second is the capacity to produce broad new thinking – to make connections between disparate themes and theories, to synthesise empirical findings, and then to fashion these into something new and compelling. To produce new narratives about the fields in which we are working.

Guestpost by Emily Goodhand, first appeared here. This week saw the return of the ‘monkey selfie’ story. A British wildlife photographer was photographing…

In the second of an ongoing series of features, Philippa Warr explores the recent trend of cloned games on mobile platforms and…

By Steven J. Watson¹,Piers Fleming², Daniel J. Zizzo³

^{1 Department of Psychology and CREATe, Lancaster University, s.watson3@lancaster.ac.uk
2 School of Economics and CREATe, University of East Anglia, daniel.zizzo@ncl.ac.uk
3 School of Psychology and CREATe, University of East Anglia, p.fleming@uea.ac.uk}

After the publication of our review exploring why people download copyrighted materials unlawfully and the impact of those downloads we were invited to contribute to this blog. This work was part of the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) and one of the paper’s key contributions was to introduce a robust method for appraising evidence from the medical sciences. One of the common themes during the debate following the release of the paper was the difference in the types of evidence available in the medical sciences compared to the IP realm. This blog considers these issues with a focus upon the systematic review process.

Science, Evidence and Errors

The power of the scientific method is that it is self-correcting; we develop models of the world and then test these models empirically. However, the consequences of persisting with suboptimal models are greater in some fields than others, for example, in medical science an incorrect consensus can cost lives. A rigorous method was needed to describe the current body of evidence in a way that could challenge and correct widely held beliefs. Systematic review filled that need. Without systematic review human albumin (a blood product), which had been used in the treatment of blood loss and burns for over 50 years, would still be used today but we now know that it is not just ineffective, but dangerous¹. This ability to overturn a practice that had been considered routine for half a century and literally save lives is why in medicine the systematic review is widely considered to be the highest quality of evidence available (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The pyramid hierarchy of evidence in medicine, with the highest quality evidence for informing action at the top and the less reliable forms of evidence further down the pyramid.

By Dr Adam Behr, Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia’s School of Political, Social and International Studies

Copyright infringement is back in the mainstream news with high-profile stars Katy Perry and Led Zeppelin both facing accusations of theft. I don’t propose to enter into a forensic examination of the merits of these claims or a scrying exercise regarding their potential success or failure. I bring them up because they point towards a couple of features of production practice that are starting to emerge from research on the CREATe project, ‘Digitisation and the Politics of Copying in Popular Music Culture’ and about which I will say more after laying out some of the context.

Copyright is a key point of concern for the music and publishing industries and often focuses on piracy, particularly with regard to digital distribution (notwithstanding that legal streaming services such as Spotify are disrupting the market for legal downloads and look like they may have a similar effect on the illegal variety). But not all copyright infringements – or otherwise problematic instances of copying – revolve around the circulation of the finished product and this post concerns a type of infringement rooted earlier on in the production chain in terms of its legal visibility – during the process of creation, rather than the distribution where piracy tends to reside –namely ‘plagiarism’.

Act early and strategically — know the value of your Intellectual Property (IP), and the best way to protect it…

The letter reproduced below was sent on 6 June 2014 by UK Intellectual Property Law Professors to the Parliamentary Scrutiny…