Information Guide: Introduction to Ownership of Rights in Research Data. CREATe, University of Glasgow, 2018

No abstract available

Guide to Creative Commons for Humanities and Social Science monograph authors

An output of the OAPEN-UK project, this guide explores concerns expressed in public evidence given by researchers, learned societies and publishers to inquiries in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and also concerns expressed by researchers working with the OAPEN-UK project. We have also identified a number of common questions and have drafted answers, which have been checked by experts including Creative Commons. The guide has been edited by active researchers, to make sure that it is relevant and useful to academics faced with making decisions about publishing. This guide is made available in open access using a CC BY licence

Comparative analysis of national approaches on voluntary copyright relinquishment

The report considers first the question of how copyright is justified, as this may have some bearing on whether a country will allow an author to make a voluntary statement leading to the expiration of his/her rights. Copyright can variously be described as a natural right, as a reward for creators, as a stimulus for creativity, as a property right, as an economic reward and as part of the public interest. Two justifications are explored, the moral and the utilitarian. The moral justification places the existence of intellectual property as a natural result of the right of the creator to anything he or she produces. The moral element of copyright has given way to the economic one, but the existence of moral rights, particularly important in civil law jurisdictions, continues to strongly represent the elements of copyright as a personality right

Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors

A booklet for authors in the humanities and social sciences specifically designed to help them understand the Creative Commons licenses

Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity

Copyright lawyers talk and write a lot about the uncertainties of fair use and the deterrent effects of a clearance culture on publishers, teachers, filmmakers, and the like, but know less about the choices people make about copyright on a daily basis, especially when they are not working. Here, Tushnet examines one subcultural group that engages in a variety of practices, from pure copying and distribution of others\u27 works to creation of new stories, art, and audiovisual works: the media-fan community. Among other things, she discusses some differences between fair use and fan practices, focused around attribution as an alternative to veto rights over uses of copyrighted works

Positive Copyright and Open Content Licences: How to Make a Marriage Work by Empowering Authors to Disseminate Their Creations

Positive copyright appears to have been progressively turned away from its normative function of ensuring a fair and efficient transmission of human knowledge. The private sector is seeking to counterbalance this phenomenon by adopting legal tools that expand the public domain of knowledge, such as web-based licences modelled on the "open access" approach. The increasing world-wide preference for Creative Commons licences confirms their aptness to transform copyright law into a tool flexible enough to serve authors' several purposes. Such a spontaneous counterbalance experiences many difficulties though, because of the structure that positive copyright has adopted over the last few years. The current situation is an excellent point from which to look back at how authors used to disseminate their works before the advent of the Internet. From a historical view-point copyright has always accomplished the twin functions of economically rewarding authors and enabling communication of their creations to the public. The latter goal is achieved by means of statutory mechanisms limiting the freedom of contract between authors and their counterparts (intermediaries in a broad sense), in order to enforce the authors' capacity to spread their works. In the current digital environment, however, these mechanisms are not likely to accomplish their original functions. This paper seeks to explore an adjustment that will permit authors to take advantage of all the new means of commercial exploitation and non-commercial dissemination of their works offered by the Internet. Such an adjustment aims also at realigning positive and normative copyright by encompassing the use of open content licensing within the current copyright framework

Copyright Contracts and Earnings of Visual Creators: A Survey of 5,800 British Designers, Fine Artists, Illustrators and Photographers

There is a common perception that digitisation has prompted changes in creative labour markets. In particular, it is widely assumed that exploiters insist on "grabbing rights" (i.e. broadly conceived assignments of rights), that visual artists are not able to negotiate, that they are paid less and less, and that they are compelled to waive their moral rights. This study suggests a much more equivocal picture. In place of a straightforward narrative of decline, the results of the survey suggest that in most fields there has been less change over the last decade than one might have expected: that, terms of exploitation are most often about the same. That is not to say that there are no discernible changes in particular occupations and media. Respondents and interviewees identify some important shifts. Perhaps surprisingly, it seems there are changes in practice that are, from the creator's perspective, both positive and negative. The most positive change is identified amongst the fine artists where half (50%) see their personal bargaining position as having improved, with only 6% perceiving a weakening. The most disturbing changes are in relation to photographers. About half of all photographers (49%) say their bargaining position has worsened, with only 22% reporting improvements. A significant percentage of photographers (40%) report an increase in assignments (compared with 6% who think they have decreased). Moreover, 24% report an increase in moral rights waivers (compared to 3% who identify a decrease), and a decline in the practice of attribution. 31% of photographers see attribution as decreasing over the last decade, and only 8% increasing. 28% say income from secondary use has decreased, while only 16% say it has decreased

Artists Don\u27t Get No Respect: Panel on Attribution and Integrity

When I was considering the question of the moral right to attribution and how unauthorized fan creativity relates to that concept, it struck me that there are two interesting issues from a theoretical perspective. The first is: who gets the credit? When I was in law school and discovered fan fiction, the reason why I got into intellectual property was because most of these stories had a disclaimer-no copyright infringement intended, these characters aren\u27t mine, I\u27m not making any money, please don\u27t sue. And as a student, my question was – does that work? Is that good enough? I was interested in these disclaimers because copyright law does not have an explicit place in the fair use test for evaluating disclaimers as a factor favoring a defense in the way that trademark law does. I, nonetheless, concluded that, in general, fan fiction was going to be fair use. It has yet to be litigated to any particular conclusion. Although cease and desist letters do so still go out, and fans still either comply or they say no, generally there is no result. That is, I think a lot of the copyright owners are unwilling to deal with the publicity and the possibility of finding this as fair use in a litigated case