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

Branding consumerism: cross-media characters and story-worlds at the turn of the 20th century

This article will serve to provide a historicised intervention on the configuration of what have come to be known as cross-media characters, fictional story-worlds, and indeed media branding at the turn of 20th-century America. The study will examine a number of innovative cross-media practices that emerged during the first decade of the 20th century, practices encouraged by the slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters, and brands across platforms, which altogether occurred through the broader rise of modern advertising and the industrialisation of consumer culture. I offer two examples of what can be termed respectively as cross-textual self-promotion and cross-media branding during this historical period, grounded in such cultural factors as turn-of-the-century immigration, new forms of mass media – such as, most notably, newspapers, comic strips and magazines – and consumerism and related textual activities

Telling the brand story: including news articles in online promotional strategies

Given the growing popularity of the Internet as a promotional medium, it is crucial for brand managers to examine the effects of combining the different brand communication sources online. According to social comprehension theory and knowledge from neuroscience, people exposed to a message spontaneously construct a mental simulation. People who are exposed to images or visuals are unlikely to assign verbal labels to their observations, whereas people who read a story may spontaneously form mental pictures of the narrative content. Mental processing of stories requires more extensive elaboration than processing of visuals. In a first study, survey results indicate online news articles about a brand are more likely to be acted upon by users than are advertisements. A second study considers integrating news articles and advertising when promoting new brands on the Internet in order to benefit from a synergistic effect. Previous studies examining a synergistic effect in marketing communications have looked at the increased effectiveness of combining multiple media or different tactics when promoting a brand. Experiment results from the second study indicate that when exposure to advertising combines with exposure to objective news about a new brand, effectiveness increases in terms of both ad and brand attitudes.elaboration, Internet advertising, news, synergy.

THE 5-D MODEL ANALYSIS OF BRD & BT FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN TERMS OF THE CHARACTERS THAT APPEAR IN ADVERTISEMENTS

In times of difficult and unstable economic environment, market players try to differentiate themselves in order to survive and attract a large number of new customers. Financial institutions, as well as the full service segment, face a major obstacle, as in the negative power of intangibility ,that is reflected in the specific economic process. The “battle” for a place in front is increasingly fierce, and financial companies have begun to focus towards the removal of this drawback, and finding new communication techniques and actions, by assigning the company with some new values that will lead to greater confidence shown within consumers. In this article, we will try to underline two different tests of image association, as in the campaigns conducted by BRD - Groupe Societe Generale and Banca Transilvania, combining an endorsement campaign with a fairytale character, all of this processed through the filter of Romania’s set of cultural characteristics.cultural values, Hofstede, financial institutes, endorsement, image association

Twitter: Businesses Increasing Their Revenues 140 Characters at a Time

With the consumer market becoming more competitive by the day, businesses must find innovative yet cost effective means of reaching their target markets and steadily increasing their revenues. While businesses compete with one another to remain the best, they must have a strategic market plan that differentiates their products and/or services from their competitors. In an effort to do this, many businesses have begun using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn as a means of reaching their target markets. Such sites have opened businesses to a new level of advertising where they reach consumers faster, have the ability to be more innovative, and spend less money than they would with conventional means of advertising. In addition to these social networking sites, Twitter has emerged, gaining interest from businesses looking to get their products and/or services out to consumers through a new medium. With the number of users increasing daily and the ease of passing information along from one user to the next, businesses have begun to see their new found means of advertising on Twitter as the way to increase their revenues 140 characters at a time. This project highlights how the understanding of the benefits of social media marketing is essential to businesses venturing into the use of Twitter. This understanding allows businesses to frame the use of Twitter to successfully fit their business strategies, while the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) shows the connection between the use of social networking sites by businesses and how it relates to the manner in which consumers are receptive to the information such sites provide. Various studies conducted on the use of Twitter by companies along with a case study on FM Global, a mutual insurance company, highlight how Twitter can be used by businesses as a marketing tool for branding purposes and increasing revenues

Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law

A girl owns a number of Barbie dolls. She makes outfits for them and constructs elaborate scenarios in which they play starring roles. She enacts her dramas in her front yard, where passers-by can easily see. Does she violate the law? What if the girl writes down her stories starring Barbie? What happens when she lets her friends read them? What if she e-mails those stories to a Barbie mailing list? What if she posts those stories and a picture of Barbie in her new outfit on her Web page? Copyright law has long been a concern more for corporations than for ordinary citizens. However, with new technologies that allow individuals to produce and distribute information easily, however, copyright law is becoming increasingly relevant to common activities. Much has been written about the problems created by the easy reproduction of copyrighted documents and by the poor fit between law and technology that makes every person who browses the World Wide Web ( the Web ) a likely lawbreaker. This Article goes beyond the debate over pure copying to analyze the implications of creative work-now widely accessible via the Internet-that draw on copyrighted elements of popular culture

Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?

This book is the result of the conference ‘Comics Scenarios: Cultural Analyses of a Picto-Graphical Medium’, organised by the Universities of Berlin and Viadrina, and held in Berlin in 2003. My chapter involves the early British comics character ‘Ally Sloper’, a Victorian anti-hero, and his crossover with other mediums, such as music hall. Specifically, it is an investigation of the various texts which have borne the signifier ‘Ally Sloper’ in the years between 1867 and 1916, in an attempt to reconstruct their context and hence recover the meanings carried by this cultural icon at key moments in his history. It also asks how Sloper’s cross-fertilisation with other mediums constituted the forerunner for modern multinational capitalism in the entertainment business. The approaches taken include a combination of political economy and Cultural Studies methodologies

Fandom-generated content: An approach to the concept of `fanadvertising’

The most appropriate term to define the current communication environment seems to be “hybridization”. Thus, halfway between fandom and User Generated Content, there are productions created by fandom. In this process of construction, the consumer becomes not only a fictional content producer, but also an advertisement diffuser. The purpose of this forum discussion is to examine the new concept of ‘fanadvertising’

Report on qualitative concept tests (D.6.2)

This report presents the findings of the qualitative concept tests, conducted as a part of WP6 of the SUMMER project. The main objective of the study is to explore consumers’ response to improved animal welfare standards in organic production systems. More specifically, the report intends to offer insights into how consumers perceive the production system, how the perception of the production system influences the perceived quality of the final products and the expectations people have from the final products. The report starts with an introductory section, where the purpose and objectives of this study are explained. Moreover, short literature reviews of concept testing and animal welfare in food research are also included. The methodology is described in the next section, which includes: an explanation of the choice of method, a description of the procedure used for conducting the focus groups, a description of the sampling method, as well as the interview guide and the stimuli used in the discussions. The findings of qualitative studies are usually vast and difficult to summarise in few pages. In this report, the findings are presented separately for the three focus groups that were conducted, where participants were split into groups based on their organic food and organic meat purchase rates, as follows: regular organic food buyers; regular organic food buyers-occasional organic meat buyers; occasional organic food buyers-occasional and non-organic meat buyers. A general overview the findings is included in the last section, where they are discussed and implications of the study are presented