Intellectual Property in Experience

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019. Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners exclusive rights to supply our fantasy worlds with everything from goods to a good time. But are there any limits? Do merchandising rights extend to fan activity, from fantasy-themed birthday parties and summer camps to real world Quidditch leagues? This Article challenges the conventional account, arguing that as the economic value of fantasy merchandising increases in the emergent “experience economy,” intellectual property owners may prove less keen on tolerating uncompensated uses of their creations. In fact, from Amazon’s Kindle Worlds granting licenses for fan fiction, to crackdowns on sales of fan art sold on internet sites like Etsy, to algorithms taking down fan videos from YouTube, the holders of intellectual property in popular fantasies are seeking to create a world requiring licenses to make, do, and play. This Article turns to social and cultural theories of art as experience, learning by doing, tacit knowledge, and performance to demonstrate that fan activity, from discussion sites to live-action role-playing fosters learning, creativity, and sociability. Law must be attentive to the profound effects these laws have on human imagination and knowledge creation. I apply the insights of these theories to limit merchandising rights in imaginative play through fair use, the force in the legal galaxy intended to bring balance to intellectual property law

Playing outside the box:transformative works and computer games as participatory culture

The main purpose of this study is to examine the creative fan community as a paradigm of participatory culture, from a computer games perspective. A review of relevant literature is used to examine transformative works and the related subculture in its many diverse forms. The produced discussion seeks to respond to a number of questions, such as: What exactly constitutes transformative work, what is the legal status of such work, and how can it be improved? To what extent do transformative works constitute a part of the play experience and enjoyment of games? Does participation in associated creative activities influence, shape or redefine the aforementioned experience? Can transformative works be appreciated as valuable artistic pieces on their own merits, outside the communities in which they are produced? Does the existence of the transformative work benefit the wider gaming culture from an artistic, financial or other point of view

Studying soap operas

This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries

“I’m a Lawyer, Not an Ethnographer, Jim”: Textual Poachers and Fair Use

This short article, written for a festschrift for Henry Jenkins, discusses the influence of his work on media fandom in legal scholarship and advocacy around fair use

Affinity spaces on Facebook: a quantitative discourse analysis towards intercultural dialogue

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on Fanfiction.net

Fanfiction.net provides an informal learning space for young writers through distributed mentoring, networked giving and receiving of feedback. In this paper, we quantify the cumulative effect of feedback on lexical diversity for 1.5 million authors.Comment: Connected Learning Summit 201

Star Trek : Arbeitsbibliographie

Eine erste Fassung der folgenden Bibliographie haben wir in: Faszinierend! STAR TREK und die Wissenschaften. 2. (hrsg. v. Nina Rogotzki [...]. Kiel: Ludwig 2003, S. 222-240) vorgestellt

Review of Masters of the Games

A review of Joseph Epstein\u27s Masters of the Games, a collection of essays, profiles, short stories, and opinion pieces about sports