The Intellectual Property framework is a crucial underpinning factor in the success of the UK's creative industries. It provides rights owners and holders with the tools to promote and distribute creative content to the public and to receive remuneration and attribution in return. However, the...

From the perspective of copyright holders, piracy represents lost revenue. In this article we argue that piracy nevertheless has important generative features. We consider the range of commercial opportunities that piracy opens up outside of the media industries, identifying four overlapping...

Is is true that, before the recent cases that are said to have redefined its path, Canadian copyright law was missing a purpose? This article presents an alternative view, based on domestic and international human rights law. It argues that the recent “upbringing” of users’ rights in...

There is a common perception that digitisation has prompted changes in creative labour markets. In particular, it is widely assumed that exploiters insist on "grabbing rights" (i.e. broadly conceived assignments of rights), that visual artists are not able to negotiate, that they are paid less...

The process of harmonisation of copyright law in the European Union has been underway for more than twenty years. Substantial progress has been made, but some fundamental issues - moral rights, authorship and ownership, copyright contracts, levies for private copying, secondary liability and...

This article develops two key insights. First, copyrighted works are affected by two types of competitive forces: substitutive competition and Schumpeterian competition. Second, the relevant magnitude of each of these competitive forces changes at various points over the life cycle of...

What happens in the cloud? Copyright owners are concerned. Users of cloud services upload, share and download copies of software and other files without their permission and access copyrighted works beyond or in violation of access limitations. Providers of cloud services are deploying novel...

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at...

Copyrights create long-lived intellectual property in goods ranging from science, literature, and music to news, film and software. The economic effects of copyright, however, are difficult to identify in modern settings. This article exploits an unintended differential increase in copyright...