[Centre] draft

Fri Aug 26 10:08:24 CEST 2011

thanks for these really useful comments, but oh the joys of modern life, I can't open the file, my corporate desktop doesn't suppprt the format.... could we use rtf or something basic like that?

L
Dr Lorraine Warren
Director Postgraduate Programmes
Senior Lecturer in Innovation
School of Management B2/3011
University of Southampton
Highfield campus
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
Tel: + 44 (0) 2380 598972
skype: lwarren1759
http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/people/details.php?Name=LorraineWarren&
http://www.doclorraine.com
twitter: @doclorraine
________________________________________
From: p2p-centre-bounces at lists.ourproject.org [p2p-centre-bounces at lists.ourproject.org] On Behalf Of Volker Grassmuck [vgrass at rz.hu-berlin.de]
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2011 4:14 AM
To: Group working in the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy
Subject: Re: [Centre] draft

Thanks Sean for your first draft and Sally-Jane — Great to meet you again! Even greater if we would be working together in this centre! — and Lorraine and Franco for edits.

Franco, you’re right, we have to agree on a mode of editing. From the interaction so far, the wiki doesn’t seem popular, while everybody seems comfortable with editing text files. So I would suggest we go with that. Please turn on „track changes”. Franco, your changes can only be extracted by a time-consuming „compare documents” procedure. Lorraine, in your version nearly all of the text is marked as „newly attributed”. So again I’m not seeing your amendments. It might be an issue of me using OpenOffice. I hope we are not losing edits.

So I’ll continue from Sally-Jane’s version with a few edits and remarks inside the text and some more points here:

1. The call is expressly for a Centre for Copyright, not for IPRs in general. I was surprised about the strong emphasis on IPRs in the draft. Do you think it increases our chance that we offer them something more than what they’ve asked for, or decreases them for missing the point?

"We believe that intellectual property rights (IPRs) need to be assessed in relation to one another, rather than isolating copyright, when so many creative entrepreneurs and practitioners look instead to patents, trademarks and designs.” — Really? I for one have been embracing rms’s campaign against the term „intellectual property” because I agree from experience that bunching the very different systems does more harm than good. And then: Authors, composers, photographers etc. protect their works with patents, trademarks and designs rather than copyright? I can’t imagine what this refers to. Could you give examples?

What seems like an example for the problems of bunching: „Should the rigorous tests of originality in patent law be applied in copyright?” — Are you implying that this is the case and we are asking whether it should be, or is this a suggestion that it should be so? Confusingly, „originality” is used both in patent and copyright law but means something very different: novelty vs personal, intellectual creation.

2. "Demonstration of need." Here you list seven areas of research we’re going to pursue. I think they should go into the next section „key features”. I also think we need to talk about them a bit more, e.g. how does 1. modeling creative practice as business relate to 6. digital labour? For establishing need I think we should talk about a fundamental shift in the industrial basis and the disruptive effects of the digital revolution. The crisis in public funding of art and culture should be mentioned, as well as the millions that the Hargreaves-based copyright reform supposedly will add to the UK economy. The whole field is in flux. We are in a large-scale in situ experiment, inventing the future as we go along. To guide political and economic actors, systematic production of empirical evidence is needed (Hargreaves).

Then it’s asking for target sectors. So we should talk about the music, film, games etc. sectors and what we can do for them. As for distinctive features, I would highlight interdisciplinarity. Existing copyright centres are ’naturally’ located inside law schools and lack intensive exchanges with media science, cultural studies, informatics, art, civil society etc. which will be one of our Centre’s strong points.

3. Business: I understand that we are catering to "painfully retarded "Creative Britain” thinkers”.  But: "The creative economy is not in large part industrial in structure.” I think this is overdoing catering to the SME trope. Large corporations are in fact responsible for a large part of revenues and jobs in creative industries and most of copyright lobbying. Also, SMEs don’t come up again in the rest of the text. P2P is mentioned only because large companies are using it. And then you mention that start-ups = SMEs are typically bought out by market dominators. If Sally-Jane is right in that this is a key concern we have to work on making it more consistent and compelling.

I hope this is useful for moving our discussion forward.

Best,
Volker