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

Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning

This paper outlines the findings of a study investigating the extent and nature of use of digital technologies by undergraduate students in Social Work and Engineering, in two British universities. The study involved a questionnaire survey of students (n=160) followed by in-depth interviews with students (n=8) and lecturers and support staff (n=8) in both institutions. Firstly, the findings suggest that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation. For learning, mainly established ICTs are used- institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites. Secondly, the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies. Thirdly, the study did not find evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge creation and sharing suggested by some previous studies. The study shows that students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Despite both groups clearly using a rather limited range of technologies for learning, the results point to some age differences, with younger, engineering students making somewhat more active, albeit limited, use of tools than the older ones. The outcomes suggest that although the calls for radical transformations in educational approaches may be legitimate it would be misleading to ground the arguments for such change solely in students’ shifting expectations and patterns of learning and technology use

From audiences to publics : convergence culture and the Harry Potter phenomenon

In the mid-nineties, changing business and communication models influenced the way in which cultural industries operated. The spheres of public and private, production and distribution, ownership and access had to be reconsidered and were characterised by convergence culture, a commercial and creative environment based on active participation that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. Convergence culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation and fosters a sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies. It is also a product of the relationship between communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow around them, and the activities they support.peer-reviewe

Iron Age in Augmented Reality

The declining number of average grade subjects in History in Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) among Malaysian students is an increasing concern in Malaysia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the connection between the factors that cause the students to become uninterested to study History and how they affect the number of average grades. This study also aims to provide a solution to help students become more interested in learning History. Using a cross-sectional analysis, this study analyzed the factors that cause students to lack interest to study History from 2016 – 2019. The lack of the ability to imagine the situation of historical events was found to play the greatest role in causing students to be less interested in learning History. This study definitively answers the question regarding correlation between the cause of lack of students’ interest in learning History and how it affects the number of average grade subjects

Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

Looks at the practices of food and beverage industry marketers in reaching youth via digital videos, cell phones, interactive games and social networking sites. Recommends imposing governmental regulations on marketing to children and adolescents

Expressions, Summer 2016

College of Humanities and the Arts Newsletter, Volume 1

Kriittinen katsaus näkökulmiin Metaversumista

In recent years, the concept of Metaverse has become a popular buzzword in the media and different communities. In 2021, the company behind Facebook rebranded itself into Meta Platforms, inc. in order to match their new vision of developing the Metaverse. The Metaverse is becoming reality as intersecting technologies, including head-mounted virtual reality displays (HMDs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), have been developed. Different communities, such as media, researchers, consumers and companies have different perspectives on the Metaverse and its opportunities and problems. Metaverse technology has been researched thoroughly, while little to none research has been done on gray literature, i.e. non-scientific sources, to gain insight on the ongoing hype. The conducted research analyzed 44 sources in total, ranging from news articles to videos and forum discussions. The results show that people are seeing opportunities in Metaverse entrepreneurship in the changing career landscape. However, the visions of Meta Platforms, inc. also receive a fair amount of critique in the analyzed articles and threads. The results suggest that most of the consumers are only interested in a smaller subset of features than what is being marketed. The conducted research gives insight on how different sources are seeing the Metaverse and can therefore be used as a starting point for more comprehensive gray literature studies on the Metaverse. While making innovations to the underlying technology is important, studying people’s viewpoints is a requirement for the academia to understand the phenomenon and for the industry to produce a compelling product