Copyright and creativity: An ongoing debate in the creative industries

This paper critically analyzes the divergent perspectives on how copyright and intellectual property laws impact creativity, innovation, and the creative industries. One perspective defines the creative industries based on copyright as the means by which revenues are generated from innovation and the dissemination of new ideas. At the same time, it has been argued that copyright and intellectual property regimes fetter creativity and innovation, and that this has become even more marked in the context of digital media convergence and the networked global creative economy. These issues have resonated in debates around the creative industries, particularly since the initial DCMS mapping study in the UK in 1998 defined creative industries as combining individual creativity and exploitable forms of intellectual property. The issue of competing claims for the relationship between copyright and the creative industries has also arisen in Australia, with a report by the Australian Law Reform Commission entitled Copyright and the Digital Economy. This paper will consider the competing claims surrounding copyright and the creative industries, and the implications for policy-makers internationally.

Making sense of society through social media

All media are social—they are after all media, in between, intermediating between producers and consumers of content, information, conversation, between the actors in the media and the audiences who read, listen, and watch. And the sociality of the media does not stop there: the processes of media production are social processes just as much as the activities of media audiencing. So strictly speaking, all media are social media. But only a particular subset of all media are fundamentally defined by their sociality, and thus distinguished from the mainstream media of print, radio, and television. It is the actual uses which are made of any medium which determine whether it is indeed a social medium—so let us investigate their roles in and interplay with the societies in which they operate.

Digital copyright and the consumer revolution: Hands off my iPod

This book documents and evaluates the growing consumer revolution against digital copyright law, and makes a unique theoretical contribution to the debate surrounding this issue. With a focus on recent US copyright law, the book charts the consumer rebellion against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (US) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (US). The author explores the significance of key judicial rulings and considers legal controversies over new technologies, such as the iPod, TiVo, Sony Playstation II, Google Book Search, and peer-to-peer networks. The book also highlights cultural developments, such as the emergence of digital sampling and mash-ups, the construction of the BBC Creative Archive, and the evolution of the Creative Commons. Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution will be of prime interest to academics, law students and lawyers interested in the ramifications of copyright law, as well as policymakers given its focus upon recent legislative developments and reform proposals. The book will also appeal to librarians, information managers, creative artists, consumers, technology developers, and other users of copyright material.

Media Village Generates Hype, Few Results in Glasgow

Driven by a desire to redevelop derelict land, attract inward investments, and better exploit the commercial potential of local talent, public authorities in Glasgow are partnering with private developers to transform an abandoned industrial dockland into a riverside business cluster for the creative industries. It’s a strategy increasingly common in a number of other peripheral regions and it highlights the new role “creativity” plays in urban rejuvenation, social renewal, and economic development. At its core, the strategy also betrays a troubling policy shift away from certain democratic conceptions of culture to ones that are more attuned to economic considerations shaped by global influences.

Infrastructure Disputes Shape Future of Streaming Media

In November 2010, tension between Internet infrastructure companies boiled over in a dispute between content distribution network (CDN) Level 3 and Internet service provider (ISP) Comcast. Level 3, a distribution partner of Netflix, accused Comcast of violating the principles of net neutrality when the ISP increased distribution fees for carrying high bandwidth services. Comcast justified its actions by stating that the price increase was standard practice and argued Level 3 was trying to avoid paying its fair share. The dispute exemplifies the growing concern over the rising costs of streaming media services. The companies facing these inflated infrastructure costs are CDNs (Level 3, Equinix, Limelight, Akamai, and Voxel), companies that host streaming media content on server farms and distribute the content to a variety of carriers, and ISPs (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, and AT&T), the cable and phone companies that provide “last mile” service to paying customers. Both CDNs and ISPs are lobbying government regulators to keep their costs at a minimum. The outcome of these disputes will influence the cost, quality, and legal status of streaming media.

Teaching independent learning skills in the first year: A positive psychology strategy for promoting law student well-being

Empirical evidence in Australia and overseas has established that in many university disciplines, students begin to experience elevated levels of psychological distress in their first year of study. There is now a considerable body of empirical data that establishes that this is a significant problem for law students. Psychological distress may hamper a law student’s capacity to learn successfully, and certainly hinders their ability to thrive in the tertiary environment. We know from Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a conceptual branch of positive psychology, that supporting students’ autonomy in turn supports their well-being. This article seeks to connect the literature on law student well-being and independent learning using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as the theoretical bridge. We argue that deliberate instruction in the development of independent learning skills in the first year curriculum is autonomy supportive. It can therefore lay the foundation for academic and personal success at university, and may be a protective factor against decline in law student psychological well-being.

Remaking Guangzhou: Geo-identity and place-making on Sina Weibo

This study uses the concept of 'place-making' to consider the formation of geo-identity on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services in China. Besides articulating state-public confrontation during major social controversies, Weibo has been used to recollect and re-narrate the memories of a city, such as Guangzhou, where dramatic social and cultural changes took place during the economic reform era. This study aims to explore how Weibo sustains political engagement through maintaining Guangzhou people's sense of belonging to their city. By collecting data from a Weibo group over a period of twelve months, I argue that Weibo politics not only takes place during a contentious events, but is sustained within the realm of everyday life. This study has the potential to contribute to the limited knowledge of Weibo use during non-contentious period in China, hence broadening the notion of popular polity in the age of social media.

Envisaging change: Supporting grassroots efforts in Colombia with agonistic design processes

Design has become increasingly engaged with bringing about social change. Shifting domains and perspectives to conflict stricken contexts yield opportunities to explore emerging forms of design that enable the expression and articulation of difference in productive ways, which can contribute positively to efforts related to civic issues and struggles in urban settings from developing countries. We explore the recently developed notion of Adversarial Design to support the integration of diverging perspectives and grassroots voices in the design process. This paper presents the findings and design insights from our study with two grassroots organisations in Bogota, Colombia. We present three themes that expose ways in which conflict motivates bringing about change, the importance of the social and physical features of the urban landscape, and the way in which social change acts as catalyst for acquiring new knowledge. To finalise, we discuss two design areas and how design could be used to integrate dissimilar worldviews.

Design: Our future

'Design: Our Future', was an important and exciting call to arms for Queensland Design and Technology teachers at the INTAD State Conference 2015 held at Harristown State High School Toowoomba on the 25 June. As the Australian Government increasingly recognises design thinking as “a ubiquitous capability for innovation” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013:90) to support a viable manufacturing sector in the Asian century, this represents an opportunity for Design and Technology teachers to provide leadership in the cultivation of these generic skills, behaviours and mindsets through secondary school education in Australia. This article, based on the conference keynote speech, outlines the value of design in education for the creative knowledge economy, the implications for Australian design and technology teachers, and the challenges ahead to ensure our future workforce is not superseded by robots.

Tweeted joke lifespans and appropriated punch lines: Practices around topical humor on social media

During the coverage of breaking news and broadcasts on social media, journalists and audiences alike share links, comments, and opinions in response to new developments. On Twitter, such content can gain increased visibility by receiving retweets from other users, through automated functions, or by manually republishing and modifying comments. This article studies tweeted coverage of the doping scandal involving Lance Armstrong in 2012 and 2013. Humorous framing is found to be popular in this discussion, and such comments experience different longevity to breaking news tweets. With these patterns come new opportunities for users to modify and appropriate punch lines in attempts to receive increased attention—and for the serendipitous creation of similar jokes—which raise questions of authorship and attribution.

Social Media Audience Metrics as a New Form of TV Audience Measurement

Digital media have contributed to significant disruptions in the business of audience measurement. Television broadcasters have long relied on simple and authoritative measures of who is watching what. The demand for ratings data, as a common currency in transactions involving advertising and program content, will likely remain, but accompanying measurements of audience engagement with media content would also be of value. Today's media environment increasingly includes social media and second-screen use, providing a data trail that affords an opportunity to measure engagement. If the limitations of using social media to indicate audience engagement can be overcome, social media use may allow for quantitative and qualitative measures of engagement. Raw social media data must be contextualized, and it is suggested that tools used by sports analysts be incorporated to do so. Inspired by baseball's Sabremetrics, the authors propose Telemetrics in an attempt to separate actual performance from contextual factors. Telemetrics facilitates measuring audience activity in a manner controlling for factors such as time slot, network, and so forth. It potentially allows both descriptive and predictive measures of engagement.

Community uses of co-creative media digital storytelling and co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

How is creative expression and communication extended among whole populations? What is the social and cultural value of this activity? What roles do formal agencies, community-based organisations and content producer networks play? Specifically, how do participatory media and arts projects and networks contribute to building this capacity in the contemporary communications environment? The latest issue of CSJ article in a special issue on “Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons” edited by Burcu Simsek.

Introduction to "International Perspectives on Business Innovation and Disruption in the Creative Industries Film, Video and Photography"

The creative industries are particularly fecund empirical fields for investigating the processes of business innovation and disruption. The creative industries are some of the fastest growing sectors in many economies (European Commission, 2001; OECD, 2006; United States Census Bureau, 2010) and thus are worthy of study in their own right. Additionally, the study of the creative industries affords insights into how we understand the current economic transformation towards knowledge- based economies more broadly. The transformation toward knowledge- based economies has been foreshadowed by the transformation of creative industries such as publishing, film, video, photography, music and so on...

The business implications of consumers’ behavioural patterns on a magazine website

This paper explores consumer behavioural patterns on a magazine website. By using a unique dataset of real-life click stream data from 295 magazine website visitors, individual sessions are grouped according to the different sections visited on the websites. Interesting behavioural patterns are noted: most importantly, 86 % of all sessions only visit the blogs. This means that the visitors are not exposed to any editorial content at all, and choose to avoid also commercial contents. Sessions visiting editorial content, commercial content or social media links are very few in numbers (each 1 per cent or less of the sessions), thus giving only very limited support to the magazine business model. We noted that consumer behaviour on the magazine website seems to be very goal-oriented and instrumental, rather than exploratory and ritualized. This paper contributes to the current knowledge of media management by shedding light on consumer behaviour on media websites, and opening up the challenges with current media business models. From a more practical perspective, our data questions the general assumption of online platforms as supporter of the print business.