[Centre] draft

Cubitt S.R. S.R.Cubitt at soton.ac.uk
Fri Sep 2 17:13:52 CEST 2011


Sorry I wasn't round earlier to respond tp this excellent set of coments -
I have one document which must be completed today; after that I'll read
the latest draft of the proposal, which I imagine already responds to
these great critiques

sean

On 26/08/2011 04:14, "Volker Grassmuck" <vgrass at rz.hu-berlin.de> wrote:

>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
>



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