The Value of Public Domain Works

Lead Research Organisation: University of Glasgow
Department Name: School of Law

Abstract

The creative process within media firms is often characterised as a binary choice between licensing existing intellectual property or creating new intellectual property owned by the business. However, a third possibility exists, which is that creators draw upon material in the public domain, such as stories and ideas that are not protected by copyright. In the 2011 Review of Intellectual Property for the UK government, Ian Hargreaves suggested that "unduly rigid application of copyright law" may "block innovation" and "hamper growth". The greater availability of creative material may indeed provide greater opportunities for the UK media sector and particularly SMEs.

While this claim is theoretically plausible, there have been no empirical studies of value creation from a public domain perspective. It is the aim of this knowledge exchange partnership to create a foundation for assessing the economic and social value that use of materials at the margins of copyright law brings to the UK economy.

Three interrelated activities are proposed, each developed iteratively with the Intellectual Property Office, and supported by short placements of researchers:

1. Mapping Public Domain Exploitation
The extent of exploitation of public domain works in commercial products is little understood. Researchers from Glasgow University and Bournemouth University will undertake an empirical study of the use of public domain content in digital interactive media (video games). Building upon previously published work to evaluate copyright exploitation in other domains, the researchers will apply an innovative content analysis methodology to UK video games published from 2003-2013. Credits and content will be analysed for the presence of licences, and public domain elements in story lines, settings, music, and other elements will be coded. This method will permit for the first time quantifying the role of the public domain in an important commercial market.

2. Business Models for the Exploitation of Public Domain Works
This project will exchange knowledge between UK SMEs and policymakers around emergent business models, to facilitate informed policy decisions to benefit UK firms. Prior academic research has already established that media SMEs face difficult decisions around IP, particularly when choosing whether to create original material, license from a third party, or engage in contract work-for-hire. Qualitative research with UK transmedia SMEs will enable the project partners to develop insight about the potential role for public domain works in the media value chain. A quota sampling method will be used to ensure the applicability of findings across a range of markets, including print, mobile, TV and interactive games.

3. Forward-looking data on works entering public domain
There is no central database of works currently in the public domain. Calls to make available information on the upcoming entry of works into the public domain has prompted a number of initiatives across the EU to create 'public domain calculators', however these projects remain limited in scope or incomplete. The project will create a publically available database of UK literary works that entered the public domain since 1992 and those due to enter the public domain until 2023. Researchers will additionally conduct quantitative time series analysis on a sample of works to enable benchmarking the economic performance of works before and after they enter PD. The database will be publically hosted on a Copyright User Portal, a joint web resource to be managed by faculty from Bournemouth University and CREATe at the University of Glasgow.

The knowledge exchange scheme will culminate in a major national conference bringing together policymakers, business managers, freelancers and academics. An associated 'hothouse' event will be hosted in which media SMEs will be invited to collaborate around a series of public domain business models.

Planned Impact

The primary beneficiaries of this project will be policymakers and staff at the Intellectual Property Office, and business in the UK media sector.

The IPO have called for empirical research and related activity to better understand the potential of the public domain and its role in the UK creative economy. To serve the public as effectively as possible, policy in this area must be based on sound empirical research and consultation with the business community. As primary beneficiaries of this knowledge exchange project, the IPO will gain actionable empirical findings to guide informed policy making, consisting of three key knowledge areas: the size and value of the public domain, the exploitation strategies available to media businesses, and the possible influence on the UK creative economy in the coming decade. Since Government IP policy directly concerns the UK creative industry and consumers, the impact of this activity will be considerable and wide reaching. In particular, the Government will be provided with the tools to be able to estimate the value of the public domain for the creative industries and establish how different policy approaches might heighten or reduce its productive use.

The knowledge produced and disseminated by this project is will assist media businesses in developing strategies to exploit public domain works. Impact will consist firstly of raised awareness, by informing media businesses about the existence and availability of public domain materials. This will be accomplished via published outputs in partnership with the Intellectual Property Office, direct engagement with the business community via planned events and via online dissemination on the Copyright Portal and other websites. Secondly, the project will have behavioural impact by providing business managers with actionable and strategically beneficial sources of knowledge (such as the forward-looking database of works entering the public domain). It is expected that media businesses will expand their repertoire of IP strategy to include PD works, potentially lowering costs and thus providing a viable alternative revenue model for risk-averse media firms. The project is expected to produce benefits for the wider economy in terms of increased UK creative industry revenues and an increase in creative output based on public domain material.
 
Title Video: SMEs, Copyright and the Public Domain 
Description This video explores the use of public domain and licensed copyright materials as inputs to commercial innovation. Interviews with successful UK media firms reveal how the availability of certain expressions, such as open source software and out of copyright artistic works, can be combined with new artistic inputs to generate commercial products. The video was supported by funding from the ESRC project, 'Valuing the Public Domain', led by CREATe at the University of Glasgow. It was produced in cooperation with copyrightuser.org, a free online resource to support understanding of copyright in the UK. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2015 
Impact The video is part of a suite of learning tools by copyrightuser.org to inform entrepreneurs about opportunities related to the exploitation of copyright and out-of-copyright works. Copyrightuser.org is an online public outreach resource aimed at making UK copyright law accessible to creators, media professionals, entrepreneurs, students, and members of the public. Its stated objective is to 'inform creators about how to protect their work, how to license and exploit it, and how to legally re-use the work of others.' 
URL https://vimeo.com/129528245
 
Description The project, titled 'Valuing the Public Domain', had the following aims: 1) map the size of the public domain in creative works and the frequency of its use; 2) analyse the role of public domain works in value creation for UK firms; 3) assist UK media companies to identify business models that derive benefit from the public domain.

The non-rival, non-excludable nature of public domain materials would seem to limit their appeal to creators in a competitive market. Any observed commercial uptake of public domain material consequently raises important questions: What stimulates creators and firms to invest in transforming or re-publishing public domain works? How do firms gain and sustain competitive advantage when exploiting freely available public domain materials? What policy options are available to promote market uptake of public domain materials, and what are the likely impacts?

The researchers undertook three related empirical data collection exercises. First, an inductive study of entrepreneurial decision making inside of UK creative firms was based on interviews with 22 businesses that had successfully exploited public domain materials. Second, a computer-assisted content analysis of 1,993 projects on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform enabled researchers to compare success rates of different kinds of IP in a live market, including public domain works. Third, a study of 1700 biographical web pages on Wikipedia permitted analysis of the value added to web pages where public domain photographs or those licensed under Creative Commons scheme were available.

Overall, findings show that new works inspired by the public domain do perform well in the marketplace and can be a source of competitive advantage for innovative firms. Public domain materials appear to attract a higher rate of funding and success on the Kickstarter platform, likely because because public domain works are familiar to potential backers and operate as a signal of quality in a market characterised by information asymmetry and high risk. UK firms that have used public domain materials successfully report benefits at different stages in the value chain. For example, they might build proprietary technologies as wrappers around placeholder PD material, which is later commercialised at little additional marginal cost alongside other licensed copyright works; some firms develop original content within a user community of other fans and consumers of a PD work, producing creative products which connect with other offerings in the transmedia ecosystem; finally, some creative firms working on public domain materials find ways of connecting with public stakeholders around issues of local and national significance, essentially enrolling public stakeholders into the value chain as co-producers. Some firms use a combination of approaches and it is likely that new approaches will be developed.

The theoretical proposition that overgrazing will diminish the value of public domain works does not appear to be a significant concern - firms are innovating with PD material despite the absence of exclusive rights in the source material.
Exploitation Route The three main areas where action is encouraged on the basis of this research are in (i) valorising UK cultural heritage by increasing accessibility, (ii) clarifying the legal status of public domain works, and (iii) improving access to information about the public domain among commercial users such as SMEs.

1) Valorising UK cultural heritage:
Research with individuals and firms revealed that creators struggle to locate public domain materials suitable for commercial exploitation. Where searchable archives of high-quality materials exist, innovators report significant benefits. A recent successful example is the British Library Mechanical Curator initiative and its various spin-out products. Unfortunately, digitisation efforts have until now taken place on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis and carry significant risk for archival institutions . Future efforts to digitise and make available works in the public domain should be particularly attuned to commercial and well as non-commercial uses. Members of the public are both consumers and stakeholders in relation to the public domain. As much as possible, members of the public and stakeholder communities should be involved in curating, preserving and disseminating public domain materials. Ideally, outputs should be of professional quality and should be presented in formats which are machine-readable, manipulable, and adaptable to different mediums.


2) Clarifying legal status of public domain works:
The creators involved in the study possessed varying degrees of knowledge about intellectual property. All expressed uncertainty when working with public domain materials. Specific gaps in knowledge included: when it is necessary to ask permission to use a work, and from whom; whether works by foreign creators may be used in the UK and under what conditions; what expressions are protected by copyright and what ideas or inspiration remain available for uptake; and what copyright rules pertain to digital or photographic reproductions of famous artwork. A number of academic initiatives in the USA and Europe in recent years have attempted to develop 'public domain calculators' capable of ascertaining the status of a given work, either automatically or with user input. However, these initiatives have failed to yield useful results, largely because of the complexity involved in determining the copyright status of a work, even within a single territorial jurisdiction. Government should provide guidance on those issues, in a format that is accessible to creators and businesses. Educational initiatives should be aimed at helping UK firms understand what is likely to be still in copyright and what is likely to be in the public domain. Increasing the strategic capabilities of the UK media sector with respect to intellectual property will likely increase licensing of copyright works alongside uptake of public domain materials - both types of usage require similar legal awareness and capacity.

3) Improving information systems:
This research demonstrates that entrepreneurs have developed business models that add value to underlying materials drawn from the public domain. Rather than express concern about the possibility of competition from later market entrants, creators were confident that they were able to retain competitive advantage on the basis of proprietary innovation. Respondents focused their concern on transaction costs: searching for and using public domain materials was often more costly than licensing a copyright work or developing original work, disinhibiting creation. Centralised databases of works with associated metadata, such as the Wikimedia Commons project, have sought to overcome the problem. Initiatives to increase the centralisation and searchability of public domain data will likely lower these barriers to entry and encourage innovation and new products. Government is encouraged to consider further research on markets where open innovation occurs, focused on enumerating the costs and benefits of open, searchable resources for creative entrepreneurship (as this is emerging as a key concern in debates about public open data).
Sectors Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
URL https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain
 
Description A case study is being submitted as a University of Glasgow REF 2021 Impact case for Unit of Assessment (UoA) 18 Law. Institution: University of Glasgow (UofG) Title of case study: Enabling digital innovation: an evidence-led approach to EU copyright law Period when the underpinning research was undertaken: 2014-2020 Details of staff conducting the underpinning research from the submitting unit: Name(s): (1) Martin Kretschmer (2) Kris Erickson (3) Bartolomeo Meletti (4) Thomas Margoni Role(s) (e.g. job title): (1) Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of CREATe Centre; (2) Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith Research Fellow; (3) Employed on a consultancy basis to develop Copyrightuser.org, thereafter Copyright Education Creative Director; (4) Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property and Internet Law Period(s) employed by submitting HEI: (1) 2012-present (2) 2013-2017 (3) 2014-2017; 2017-present (4) 2016-2020 Period when the claimed impact occurred: 2015-2020 Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014? No 1. Summary of the impact Copyright law governs the use of a wide range of cultural materials. In the digital age, it is increasingly difficult to know whether these materials can be used, and how permissions should be sought. UofG research has: (i) produced evidence to inform the EU copyright debate. From 2015 onwards, Kretschmer coordinated an academic response to proposed EU legislation, which persuaded a majority of MEPs to reject the first negotiation mandate for the Copyright Directive in 2018. The research: (ii) supported amendments to articles 5, 11 & 13, which protect the rights of EU citizens over corporate interests. The same research underpins one of the UK's leading copyright guidance websites, which has: (iii) shaped the creative policy and practice of copyright 'users' within the creative sector via engagement with the British Film Institute. 2. Underpinning research Almost every activity on a mobile phone, computer or network involves acts of copying. Copyright law has effects that go far beyond its origins of regulating the behaviour of competitors in the same industry sector (e.g. such as protecting a publisher against a re-publisher). It now affects the infrastructure of society, and the role of creators and users as citizens. CREATe, the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre (hosted by the UofG School of Law) was established in 2012 to enable a new evidence-led understanding of copyright law. 2.1. Reconceiving the 'users' of copyright CREATe researchers have studied how to enable the creative sector to develop a much wider range of behavioral options relating to copyright. In 2015, an assessment [O1] was undertaken across six artistic mediums: music, film, performance, visual art, writing and interactive development. It sought to understand creators, entrepreneurs, educators and consumers as 'users' of copyright. The research identified and quantified obstacles to creative re-use that arise from misunderstandings of the boundaries of copyright law [O2] and proposed specific interventions to release the value of the creative re-use of material (e.g. increasing the amount of material available in the public domain through legislation; improving knowledge about the boundaries of copyright law among creators; and improving information flow between creative industries and holders of public domain materials). These recommendations were implemented by UofG researchers in the development of the UK online guidance portal CopyrightUser.org (led by CREATe). 2.2. The EU Copyright Directive When the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive was proposed by the European Commission in September 2016, CREATe undertook a series of evidence reviews and empirical studies [O3, O4, O5, O6] relating to the most controversial provisions in the draft legislation. The research found that evidence did not support provisions in Articles 5, 11 and 13, which sought to alter the balance between protecting and rewarding rightholders and facilitating user innovation. Article 5 (which later became Articles 3 and 4), proposed a new narrow exception that was designed to enable copying of materials in the process of text-and-data-mining. However, the exception was restricted to purposes of scientific research (thus excluding cultural heritage institutions, journalists and commercial start-ups). Margoni and Kretschmer's research [O4] showed that text-and-data-mining is misconceived as a copyright relevant activity, as the purpose of mining is extracting information from works, not copying the works. Article 11 (later Article 15), proposed that anyone using snippets of journalistic online content must first get a licence from the publisher, potentially affecting everyday activities such as blogging and hyperlinking. Along with Professor Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge) and others, Kretschmer was commissioned by the European Parliament to review the laws of seven Member States to see how far the proposed new articles would 'add value' [O5]. The desk work was executed primarily by the University of Cambridge, with a subcontract given to Prof. Kretschmer, who drew extensively upon the body of empirical evidence from CREATe research. A key finding was that previous interventions to establish press publishers' rights in Germany and Spain did not produce the intended effects (e.g. enforcing the rights of publishers and generating income from US tech companies). It also found that the proposal favoured incumbent publishing interests over innovation (e.g. the interests of quality journalism, small publishers or news-related start-ups). Article 13 (later Article 17) proposed to change the liability regime so that platforms that host user-generated content (e.g. YouTube) would become responsible for unlawful content found on their sites. A likely consequence of such proposals would be the introduction of large-scale upload filtering software-a burden that would likely discourage start-ups and effectively lock-in YouTube's dominance. Automated takedown would struggle to tell copyright infringement apart from legal uses such as parody; as a result, legitimate content would be removed, thus affecting creative freedoms. Kretschmer and Erickson's research [O6] investigated the factors that motivate takedown requests of user-generated content by copyright owners using an original dataset of 1,839 music video parodies. The research found that takedown requests by copyright holders already results in the removal of lawful content, and that policy concerns frequently raised by rightholders are not associated with statistically significant patterns of action. 3. References to the research [O1] K Erickson, P Heald, F Homberg, M Kretschmer and D Mendis, Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain: An Empirical Assessment (2015), Project Report, UK Intellectual Property Office, Newport. [O2] P Heald, K Erickson and M Kretschmer, "The valuation of unprotected works: a case study of public domain photographs on Wikipedia" (2015) 29(1) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 1-32. [O3] M Kretschmer, S Dusollier, C Geiger and PB Hugenholtz, "The European Commission's public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain: a response by the European Copyright Society" (2016) 38(10) European Intellectual Property Review 591-595. [O4] T Margoni and M Kretschmer, "The text and data mining exception in the proposal for a directive on copyright in the digital single market: Why it is not what EU copyright law needs", paper presented at European Policy for IP, Berlin (07/09/2018), and Global Congress on IP & Public Interest, Washington (27/09/2018). Available as a CREATe blog (25/04/18). [O5] L Bently, M Kretschmer, T Dudenbostel, M Calatrava Moreno, and A Radauer, Strengthening the Position of Press Publishers and Authors and Performers in the Copyright Directive (2017), Project Report, European Parliament, Brussels. [PDF available] [O6] K Erickson, and M Kretschmer, "This video is unavailable": analyzing copyright takedown of user-generated content on YouTube (2018) 9(1) Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law 75-89. Evidence of the quality of the research: Output [O1] is an 81-page research report that was peer reviewed by the UK Intellectual Property Office prior to publication. Outputs [O2] and [O6] are published in international double-blind peer reviewed law journals. 4. Details of the impact 4.1. Context Copyright policy has suffered from the lack of an accepted evidence base. It is a highly technical field of law that, through digitization, is suddenly implicated in everyday life. The debate around the EU Commission's proposals for copyright reform (2015-2019) was played out amid intense corporate lobbying aimed at MEPs, governments and the general public. The face-off between US tech companies (e.g. Google) versus European collecting societies, record companies and press publishers, led to widespread accusations of deception and unfair lobbying. Amid this confusion, there was a real danger that the interests of EU citizens would be drowned out. 4.2. Informing the EU copyright debate CREATe's interdisciplinary research has provided EU citizens and policymakers with a trusted source of information during the course of this complex debate (as demonstrated by the report on corporate lobbying [E1]). Kretschmer also disseminated research findings and advocated CREATe's evidence-led approach through invited presentations at hearings in the European Parliament and at high-level roundtables for the European Commission (confirmed by collated evidence [E2]). A key recommendation of the research [O1] was to support innovation by increasing the amount of material available for re-use without seeking permission. When the final study [O1] was published in 2015, it fed into a European Parliament review of the 2001 Copyright Directive. The then Rapporteur cited the research in Parliament and endorsed its role in safeguarding public domain works for the benefit of EU society: 'the empirical results generated by the CREATe study helped my colleagues and I advocate for change to European copyright that will improve the regulatory landscape for creators and users.' (confirmed by letter [E3]). When controversial new legislation was introduced by the European Commission in September 2016, Kretschmer drew upon the underpinning research to coordinate an academic response to the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. CREATe's digital portal [E4] became a focal point for this activity, providing a hub for the dissemination of academic statements and the findings of CREATe's most relevant research [O2, O3, O4]. As a result of the initiative of Kretschmer (and others), over 200 academics signed open letters opposing Articles 11 and 13. These interventions also advocated opening Article 5 (which became Articles 3 and 4: exceptions for text-and-data-mining) to all users, including for commercial purposes (confirmed by open letters [E5]). Kretschmer then co-authored an academic statement entitled 'Misinformation and Independent Enquiry' (known as the CREATe Statement [E6]), which received over 40,000 impressions on Twitter. This was a key piece of evidence that persuaded a majority of MEPs to reject the first negotiation mandate for the Directive in the vote on 5 July 2018. This rejection was highly significant, as it represented a surprise result in the face of extensive corporate lobbying (e.g. Google alone held 22 meetings with high-level European Commission staff specifically on copyright). With the Commission's proposals sent back to the drawing board by Parliament, the then Shadow Copyright Rapporteur wrote: 'I cannot stress enough that I think the active academic intervention in this vote has been absolutely decisive for this first success' [E7]. 4.3. Supporting amendments to the EU Copyright Directive As the result of the research and interventions of CREATe (and others), specific changes were made to the Copyright Directive prior to the vote in respect of Article 11, and subsequent to the vote in respect of Articles 5 and 13. For example, the European Parliament commissioned study [O5] was presented to the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) on 7 December 2017 [E2]. Its concerns that the reform would give big media players the power to monetize their content online (at a cost to the circulation of news) were reflected in an explicit exemption for 'hyperlinking' introduced by Parliament to the Commission draft (and further amendments that remove 'individual words or short extracts' and 'private or non-commercial uses' from the scope of the new right). For Articles 5 and 13, the European Parliament introduced later amendments that enabled the rejected draft to pass plenary votes (on 11 September 2018 and 26 March 2019 respectively). For Article 5, the scope of the text-and-data-mining exception was extended to embrace cultural heritage institutions (in line with the findings of [O4]). For Article 13, obligations were re-focused on major platforms (e.g. YouTube). In line with the findings of the underpinning research [O6], exemptions were provided for 'microenterprises and small-sized enterprises, educational or scientific repositories' under a new definition of an 'online content-sharing service provider' introduced as Article 2(6). The amended Copyright Directive was approved by the European Parliament on 26 March 2019 and the European Council on 15 April 2019. While the revised provisions remain problematic, a former MEP and Copyright Rapporteur of the Internal Market Committee confirms that, 'Prof. Kretschmer's research underpinned the case for innovation-enabling improvements' (statement [E8]). She (and other MEPs) relied upon academic evidence throughout the highly complex debate (as confirmed by transcript [E9]). Statement [E8] specifically confirms the role of the empirical evidence provided by the underpinning UofG research [O4, O5, O6] within that process: 'The importance of academic input into the copyright debate was essential due to the polarised nature of the debate and the power of those right holders' lobbies who were not supporting creators but profit. Without academic input, there would have been little counter argument particularly as the subject is complex and legalistic.' 4.4. Shaping the creative policy and practice of copyright users Based upon the underpinning research [O1, O2], CREATe's CopyrightUser.org web portal has become one of the UK's most authoritative copyright guidance sites, attracting more than 1,661,003 unique visitors since 2017 [E10]. This resource enables educators and cultural heritage practitioners to access independent copyright guidance based upon up-to-date empirical evidence. Its success has been widely recognized. For example, the European Commission commissioned the Council of Europe's European Audiovisual Observatory to carry out an independent study to identify the most significant media literacy projects carried out since 2010-CopyrightUser.org was in the top 5 for the UK in 2016 [E11]. As a direct result of engagement with CopyrightUser.org, there is evidence of changes to policy and practice within the cultural heritage sector. For instance, based upon the underpinning research [O1], Meletti was seconded to the British Film Institute (BFI) from 2017-2018. The BFI hosts the largest public searchable database dedicated to British films released in the UK. This flagship platform for the BFI's mass digitization project has received over 74 million views to date. As a result of Meletti's secondment, the BFI reappraised its copyright policy, guidance and staff training (as confirmed by statement [E12]). The BFI's Rights Database Manager testifies that, 'links to pages on Copyrightuser.org have been embedded in our internal policy and guidance documents to help provide more information and context on copyright research [] Approximately 35 members of BFI staff have used guidance [] Using Copyrightuser.org in this way helps us particularly where we are unable to give legal advice but can direct people to the resources on the website so they can gather more information about the issues'. [E12] The secondary beneficiaries of the BFI's revised copyright guidance are its members and partner organisations. These changes enable creators (e.g. filmmakers and educators) to use archive material more readily in their creative projects. For instance, in 2017 the BFI supported a pilot project to supply films to students for creative reuse. The project has since grown across the UK and Ireland and now provides 60 Higher Education Institutions with access to 39 titles for creative projects. The BFI's Rights Database Manager confirms that, 'The ongoing impact of [Meletti's] secondment and continued use of Copyrightuser.org [] has brought positive changes to the BFI for both our internal development of clearer and evidence-based copyright policies and how we communicate with partners and the public to deliver our public mission.' [E12] 5. Sources to corroborate the impact [E1] Corporate Europe Observatory Report on Copyright Directive lobbying (Opinions attributed to 'academics' (e.g. on p.11) hyperlink to the Academic Statement [E5], hosted on the CREATe website, which cites the underpinning research [O5] among the key academic contributions on p.5) [pdf available] [E2] Collated evidence: invited presentations at hearings in the European Parliament and at high-level roundtables for the European Commission (2014-2017) including confirmation of Bently and Kretschmer's presentation of the proposed press publishers' right (7 Dec 2017) [pdfs available] [E3] Letter from MEP/Rapporteur (29 January 2016), acknowledging influence of Erickson/Kretschmer report [O1] on review. [pdf available] [E4] CREATe EU Copyright Reform digital resource: https://www.create.ac.uk/policy-responses/eu-copyright-reform/ [pdf available] [E5] Academics against Press Publishers' Right Statement (10 September 2018) (voting recommendations based upon two open letters) [pdf available] [E6] Academic statement entitled 'Misinformation and Independent Enquiry' (29 June 2018) known as the 'CREATe Statement', co-authored by Kretschmer [pdf available] [E7] Email from MEP (10 July 2018) (confirms the decisive role of the academic intervention) [pdf available] [E8] Statement from former MEP and Copyright Rapporteur of the Internal Market Committee, now CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation (June 2020) (confirms the importance of the academic intervention and the use by policymakers of the underpinning research [O4, O5, O6] [pdf available] [E9] Transcript of former MEP and Copyright Rapporteur's contribution to the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Extraordinary meeting (13 March 2017) [IMCO (2017)0313_1, 13/3/2017], (in which she relies on evidence presented in the open academic letter of 24 February 2017)[pdf available]. [E10] CopyrightUser.org has attracted 1,661,003 unique visitors since 2017 (figures confirmed by a GoAccess report on the 28 August 2020)[pdf available] [E11] Mapping of media literacy practices and actions in EU-28. European Audiovisual Observatory, Strasbourg 2016 (confirms CopyrightUser.org was in the top 5 media literacy projects in the UK in 2016 on p.379). [pdf available] [E12] Statement from the Rights Database Manager, British Film Institute (June 2020) [pdf available]
First Year Of Impact 2015
Sector Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural,Societal,Economic,Policy & public services
 
Description Citation by MEP Julia Reda in support of copyright reform
Geographic Reach Europe 
Policy Influence Type Citation in other policy documents
Impact In a speech on 3rd March 2015, titled 'Towards a new legislation on Intellectual Property in the digital single market', European MEP Julia Reda cited our public domain research while arguing for political action to preserve and enlarge the digital public domain in Europe. Discussing our empirical results on the value of Wikipedia, she stated: 'What these authors found was that [...] having these kinds of works increases the understanding, increases the attractiveness of a site like Wikipedia. So what you can see is that if we don't have a public domain, projects like Wikipedia, which are in the public interest, would not even be possible to start, because the commercial investment that would be needed to clear the rights to images would be a huge obstacle to any commercial business going in this direction.' (MEP Julia Reda, 3 March, 2015).
URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwhieAogRtM
 
Description Citation by Wikimedia Foundation
Geographic Reach National 
Policy Influence Type Citation in other policy documents
Impact Wikimedia Foundation cited research by Heald, Erickson and Kretschmer on the valuation of public domain images for Wikipedia, which was funded by ESRC Grant ES/K008137/1. The research shows that reducing the public domain would incur welfare costs for society, and the authors calculate those costs in terms of access to free content on Wikipedia, amounting to between USD $200-230 million annually in consumer surplus. Wikimedia Foundation used this evidence as a basis to argue for halts to copyright term extension and other restrictions on the size of the public domain.
URL https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/April#Excessive_copyright_terms_proven_to_b...
 
Description ESRC Festival of Social Science Open Innovation Design Jam
Amount £800 (GBP)
Organisation Economic and Social Research Council 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 11/2016 
End 11/2016
 
Title Text mining extractor tool for Kictstarter research 
Description In support of the research project 'Valuing the Public Domain', the research team developed a bespoke software tool to extract information from the online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and analyse its contents. This tool enabled the research team to gather a dataset of 1,993 product pitches on the platform during Q1 2014, and analyse the corpus of text to generate quantitative data about market performance of items in the sample. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact The extractor and text mining tool has been improved and can now be used to update and replicate the previous study for comparison, or conduct novel studies with different research questions. The research team has been approached by a third sector organisation (EFF) to run a new study using the existing methodology to measure the market performance of open vs closed DRM in technology and design products. That follow-on study is currently under development in 2016. 
 
Description CREATe and Learning on Screen partnership agreement 
Organisation Learning on Screen
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution CREATe and Learning on Screen are currently in the process of formalising a partnership agreement to collaborate on the best practice project (H2020 reCreating Europe).
Collaborator Contribution Learning on Screen - a charity and membership organisation specialised in the use of moving image and sound in education and research - offers a course on Copyright and Creative Reuse in Education, aimed primarily at copyright officers, e-learning technologists, librarians and other members of staff who are responsible for advising colleagues on copyright issues in HE institutions. An entire session of the course is dedicated to demonstrating how The Game is On! resource can be used to teach UK copyright law. The Copyright Guidance page of the Learning on Screen website links to several pages of CopyrightUser.org: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/copyright-guidance/
Impact The Copyright Guidance page of the Learning on Screen website links to several pages of CopyrightUser.org: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/copyright-guidance/ CREATe and Learning on Screen are currently in the process of formalising a partnership agreement to collaborate on the best practice project (H2020 reCreating Europe).
Start Year 2019
 
Description Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Conference, Berlin 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Abstract:

The authors analyse 1,993 product pitches on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for the first quarter (January - March) of 2014. The sample includes successful, unsuccessful, and cancelled or suspended projects in the categories of publishing, video games, comics, theatre and film. These categories were selected because they consist of expressions which can be protected by copyright, and thus have comparable licensing parameters. Other categories include products which can be protected with patent or design right, which have different licensing requirements.

The authors estimate an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model on the reported cost of production for media products in five categories. Controlling for popularity, status of pitch creator, previous experience and other factors which may influence perceived value, we find a moderately significant negative effect of in-licensing of copyright works on the price of a good set by creators, compared to 'pure' original works. The authors interpret this to indicate that in-licensing has a cost-savings effect for creators. The result is somewhat confounded by the lack of a corresponding significant effect for the re-use of works in the public domain (non-copyright inputs). We interpret this to indicate that in-licensing of third-party IP confers additional cost-savings benefits to creators beyond simple permission to use an expression (such as valuable tools or assets related to the license). To test for the presence of increased payoff for original creators, the authors use a logistic regression employing the outcome of success or failure for product pitches as dependent variable. Holding constant the amount of funding initially pitched for (which is shown to significantly impact the outcome), we find a strongly significant positive effect for transformative use in both in-licensing and public domain adaptation, on the likelihood of a project's success.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL https://aoir.org/aoir2016/
 
Description European Law and Economics Association (EALE) Conference, Bologna 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Abstract:

This paper exploits the patronage-like features of an online crowdfunding market to study the effect of transaction and licensing costs on the ability of follow-on creators to successfully reuse existing works. We study the reported costs of production of 1,993 projects seeking funding on the Kickstarter platform from January to March 2014 to see if re-use of copyright material has a measurable effect on the cost of creation under four different conditions: (1) the creator has obtained a copyright license; (2) the creator vows to seek a license if funding is successful; (3) the creator borrows from a copyright work but does not discuss licensing; and (4) the creator borrows from a work in the public domain.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL http://eale.org/conference/eale-2016-bologna/general-information-2
 
Description European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Conference, Oxford 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Abstract:

Kristofer Erickson (University of Glasgow, CREATe), Fabian Homberg & Martin Kretschmer, "Measuring the costs and benefits of copyright re-use for follow-on creators: evidence from a crowdfunding marketplace"

This paper exploits the patronage-like features of an online crowdfunding market to study the effect of transaction and licensing costs on the ability of follow-on creators to successfully re-use existing works. We study the reported costs of production of 1,993 projects seeking funding on the Kickstarter platform from January to March 2014 to investigate if re-use of copyright material has a measurable effect on the cost of creation under four different conditions: (1) the creator has obtained a copyright license; (2) the creator vows to seek a license if funding is successful; (3) the creator borrows from a copyright work but does not discuss licensing; and (4) the creator borrows from a work in the public domain.

Previous experimental research has explored the effect of copyright protection on the ability of follow-on creators to in-license and transform existing works. Crosetto (2010) conducted experiments on sequential creativity in which players were given the opportunity to exclude others from a solution to a word puzzle in exchange for a set royalty fee. When the royalty fee condition was higher, participants tended to protect their innovations, leading to anti-commons conditions and a failure to transact. In a low fee condition, players obtained higher payoffs by opening initial innovations and extending other players' open solutions. Bechtold et al (2016) employ a similar experimental approach to study creators' ability to judge whether borrowing or originating is the most beneficial strategy under different licensing cost conditions, on the assumption that copyright imposes costs on sequential innovators:

'According to rational choice theory, a would-be creator, faced with this borrow/innovate decision, should compare the costs and benefits of borrowing with the costs and benefits of innovating. Borrowing entails a variety of costs including, primarily, licensing fees and transaction costs. Innovating, on the other hand, may involve substantial investments in research and experimentation that borrowing does not.' (2016: 16).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL http://www.epip2016.org/book-of-abstracts/erickson
 
Description European Policy for Intellectual Property Conference (EPIP 2015) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Research findings were presented to an audience of 60 delegates at the EPIP 2015 conference. EPIP is a conference for academics, legal practitioners and policy makers to discuss issues relating to the regulation of Intellectual Property in Europe (including patent, trade mark and copyright). Following the presentation, the Chief Economist for the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights contacted the authors to request the full research results, which were supplied.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL http://www.epip2015.org/make-buy-or-borrow-creative-industry-business-models-from-public-domain-inpu...
 
Description Invited WIPO Seminar on Economics of Intellectual Property 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Investigator Erickson was invited to present findings from the ESRC funded study 'Valuing the Public Domain' to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialist agency of the United Nations in Geneva. The talk, which attracted 60 attendees, was focused on the theme of the economics of Intellectual Property, and in particular empirical evidence of the economic contribution of public domain materials. in the discussion which followed the presentation, several national representatives (Chile, Spain) expressed interest in the research methods and results for local national policy making. The findings were also features in WIPO Magazine, an industry journal produced by the organization's press office, and IP Watch, an independent press outlet in Geneva.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/07/10/study-documents-public-domains-importance-to-innovation-and-creat...
 
Description Participation in Strategy Conference, CASS Business School, London 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The researchers were invited to take part and present findings at the Cass Strategy workshop in London. This two-day annual workshop attracts leading management studies scholars and researchers in related fields, including PhD students/
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2017
 
Description Stakeholder Event: Workshop for Creative Firms 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact The purpose of this event was to engage the stakeholder community of small and medium sized creative businesses with research results related to improving the exploitation of public domain materials. The day long event was held in London, at the offices of Digital Catapult and attracted 65 participants. Morning presentations by stakeholder representatives from the British Library, Auroch Digital, and 3Turn Productions were followed by a panel debate with representatives from the Intellectual Property Office, Wikimedia Foundation and the research team. The event explored practical applications of the research findings (new business models, product pitch simulation) and explored partnerships between public and private users of public domain materials.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2014
URL http://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2014/09/25/valuing-the-public-domain-a-workshop-for-uk-creative-firms/
 
Description WIPO Magazine: Generating Value from the Public Domain 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact An article commissioned by WIPO Magazine and written by co-investigator Erickson appeared in both the print and online versions of the journal. WIPO Magazine reaches an international audience of policy makers, law practitioners, and businesses. It is translated in three languages: English, French and Spanish. Subsequent to publication, the researchers were contacted by academics and journalists from other outlets to discuss the research findings. A longer academic working paper containing more detail has emerged from the magazine article and is in development for submission to an academic journal in 2016.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2015
URL http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2015/04/article_0008.html