Follow-on Funding: Improving Deliberation, Improving Copyright

The main aim of this project is to co-produce, with key stakeholder organisations and members of the public, a new deliberative model for consultations that can help policymakers to obtain better evidence to support copyright policymaking and potentially other areas of media policy. Our project objectives are: (1) to engage in dialogue with stakeholders about their experiences of copyright consultations and combine these insights with the findings of our own research; (2) to co-produce, with stakeholders, a new deliberative model of consultation for copyright policy that is robust, sustainable, and satisfies key democratic principles; (3) to share the model with the UK Intellectual Property Office as a tool for planning future consultations about copyright; (4) to explore with Ofcom the possibilities of using the model for consultations about other areas of media policy; and (5) to distribute the project outputs to relevant policymaking communities via the stakeholder and project team's networks.

The proposal draws on the project team's previous research into how copyright is variously understood, communicated, and debated by different groups in society (see Klein, Moss and Edwards 2015). Most directly, it builds on a recent AHRC-funded study, 'Improving Deliberation, Improving Copyright' (AH/K000179/1), which explored how members of the public can be engaged in discussing copyright policy more effectively (Edwards, Moss, & Karvelyte, 2017). The project brought 88 members of the public together over one weekend to deliberate about copyright and ways it might change. Participants engaged enthusiastically with the event and greatly valued the opportunity to discuss copyright with one another, but they also wanted to understand and engage further with the perspectives of other key stakeholders, such as industry representatives and creative workers, and to know how their input could inform copyright policymaking. By working with all relevant stakeholders to consider how the public voice can be incorporated into policy consultations more effectively, this follow-on project addresses these points directly.

To achieve our objectives, the project will adopt a creative and flexible approach that focuses on knowledge-sharing and exchange through project design, stakeholder engagement, and final outputs. The project begins with in-depth dialogues with stakeholder groups (creative workers, creative industry companies, intermediaries, regulatory bodies, relevant government departments, and members of the public), which will explore their experiences of consultation exercises and share the findings from our previous research. A one-day workshop will then bring stakeholders together in order to co-produce a draft model for deliberative copyright consultations. Our emphasis on co-production will ensure that the model will be jointly owned by all participants and provides a basis for developing a sustainable, realistic and more legitimate approach to copyright policymaking. The model and report will then be introduced to policymakers and consultation leaders at a training event for consultation planning. Stakeholders will join the researchers to present the model, talk about their experience during the project, and discuss the model's advantages and limitations. All the project outputs will be open access, made available via our project webpage for our stakeholders and other interested groups to reference and draw upon in future consultations.

The beneficiaries of the project are:
- Organisational stakeholders and members of the public, who will benefit from increased access and/or better input into policy making via deliberative consultation in future.
- UK-based policy makers and consultation leaders employed at the IPO and Ofcom, who can apply the model to improve future consultations, increasing the accessibility and legitimacy of these exercises.
- The wider international copyright policy making community, who have been engaged in or led public consultation but face challenges of legitimacy and inclusivity. Improved deliberation in policy consultations in contested fields remains a high priority for global regulators, and our expectation is that the project outputs will lead to international discussion about ways to improve consultation, using the deliberative approach we develop.
- Scholars working in the area of copyright policy and deliberative democracy, who will be able to draw on the methods, findings and outputs of the research to enhance their work

Direct impact will be accomplished primarily through the collaboration activities built into the proposed follow-on work: dialogic discussions with a wide range of stakeholders; a deliberative workshop focused on improving copyright consultation processes; the production of a working model of engagement that can be used in forthcoming consultation initiatives; and a training event to disseminate the model. Indirect impact will be achieved primarily through a project website containing all the project outputs and making the model available to stakeholders, using accessible technologies and a range of different formats to ensure all stakeholders can access the outputs. It will be a hub for dissemination, enabling us to easily circulate the outputs across our networks. To ensure that stakeholders are aware of and visit the website, we will distribute the link and model directly to beneficiaries via our collaborators' UK and international networks as well as via social media, extending their impact at both national and EU level. Already committed stakeholders include EU-level organisations (COMMUNIA, Media and Learning Conference) whose members are from countries across the region and who will be a valuable resource for disseminating the guidelines and model to relevant EU-based organisations. Other stakeholders (e.g. PACT, MMF, AIP), are connected to international organisations and will also be able to disseminate the model to relevant international audiences. The project team's own existing networks include policymakers in Brussels and the USA, who will be included in the stakeholders to whom we disseminate the outputs. We will follow up with them through our regular contact via other ongoing research projects and through policy conferences (e.g. the European Policy and IP (EPIP) conference, which draws an academic and practitioner audience). We will track dissemination of outputs carefully as they are publicised and deployed (e.g. by tracking where the link to our website appears on stakeholder websites, following social media activity, keeping track of consultations).

In summary, the impact from the project will be as follows:
1. Direct dialogue, providing stakeholders with a chance to reflect on and share views about copyright policymaking and experiences of public engagement and consultation;
2. Model development, offering stakeholders a voice in how consultation should be conducted and a chance to participate in the development of new models of consultation in such a way that they are able to engage with others in a respectful and reflexive way;
3. Model distribution, supplying a ready-to-use resource that can improve consultation processes and support a more robust and inclusive approach to policymaking. When implemented, this will give the public a meaningful ability to engage in copyright and other areas of media policy and regulation;
4. 2 conference papers and one academic article.