Search

A central part of the innovation process concerns the way firms go about organizing search for new ideas that have commercial potential. New models of innovation have suggested that many innovative firms have changed the way they search for new ideas, adopting open search strategies that involve the use of a wide range of external actors and sources to help them achieve and sustain innovation. Using a large-scale sample of industrial firms, this paper links search strategy to innovative performance, finding that searching widely and deeply is curvilinearly (taking an inverted U-shape) related to performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tensions inherent in the ownership and reuse of scholarly works, with a focus on achieving open access (OA) aims via Creative Commons licences. This US initiative has had an enormous impact on the access to, dissemination and reuse of UK-authored scholarly literature since the Finch report of 2012. However, confusion abounds within the funding, publishing and academic communities about the correct uses and long-term implications of using such licences. This has legal consequences, as well as consequences for the author, readers and institutions who have to report compliance regarding OA in order to secure future research funding. Ownership is an important part of this picture. Creative Commons licences are legally binding on licensor and licensee, and only the copyright owner may release their work under such a licence. The complex research funding and sharing ecosystem has resulted in a 'policy stack' challenge1 with authors given little choice about their options. This paper examines some of these challenges through an exploration of current UKRI policy and the copyright licences of one publisher, with a focus on text and data mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends recent discussions about copyright and the public domain by looking at attempts in post-war Britain to promote access to scientific information. More specifically, it concentrates on the Royal Society's Fair Copy Declaration (1950) and the related library copying provisions introduced in the Copyright Act 1956, which were designed to protect access to information. While the UK library copying provisions were presented as an expanded version of the Fair Copy Declaration recast in a statutory format, we show that the library copying provisions reflected a specific way of thinking about creation, production and distribution that differed markedly from those that underpinned the Fair Copy Declaration. We also argue that the logic of creation reflected in the library copying provisions shaped copyright law over the course of the twentieth century and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree to which Open Educational Resources (OER) reflect the values of its institutional provider depends on questions of economics and the level of support amongst its academics. For project managers establishing OER repositories, the latter question - how to cultivate, nurture and maintain academic engagement - is critical. Whilst participating in the HEFCE funded institutional OER programme (2009-10), the team at the University of Exeter encountered a range of academic opinions on OER, and followed many as they rode the peaks and troughs of opportunities and challenges that this kind of work entails. This paper discusses the potential motivators for academics in providing OER material, as an understanding of these is helpful when introducing the subject to new contributors, and when informing planning decisions - both procedural and financial - so that key incentives are protected. We will also look at the reasons for some academic scepticism surrounding OER and how these views can be - if not tempered - then at least understood with a view to informing future policy. The enthusiastic advocacy that some academics possess in relation to OER is borne of their vision of its use. It is important to ensure that the high priority objective of obtaining academic support does not overlook instances where there is tension between this vision, and what can be achieved with available resources. We will discuss the key information that OER managers need in order to mitigate this scenario. OER projects do not work in isolation from internal competition and it has been essential to be sensitive to the conflicting pressures that academics have to contend with in their work profile. We will discuss the value of establishing where an OER project sits within an institution's educational and research strategies, and its financial framework, the questions to ask and the signs to spot to obtain this information, and how managers can use this knowledge to make decisions, avoid pitfalls and garner support. This will involve addressing academic initiatives and reward schemes, including a discussion of how IPR and copyright can not only present challenges but also play an important role in motivating and demonstrating academic engagement. This paper draws upon formal and informal engagement with a range of stakeholders who have been involved in the project, including the many colleagues who attended several staff development sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of the technological measures that copyright holders employ to lock their works and discusses why users are disadvantaged. It compares the anticircumvention rules in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US and the Copyright, Patents and Designs Act in the UK; the latest exemptions to circumventing activities released by the US Library of Congress are included. It reviews the evolution of Chinese anti-circumvention rules, starting with a well-known case preceding the promulgation of the anti-circumvention rules, then it examines the anti-circumvention provisions in the Copyright Act 1990, the Software Regulation 2001 and the ISP Interpretation 2004. It also critically analyzes the latest Network Regulation 2006 by comparing it with the DMCA and the CDPA. The paper suggests that the Chinese anticircumvention rules need to be constructed with more legal certainties. Recommendations are also made for additional redrafting to make China's anti-circumvention rules more adaptive to a digital environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing tendency to implement criminal IP provisions into UK law. This paper proposes that the current UK law should not be reformed so as to have increased criminal penalties, because such penalties when applied to information can be too blunt in an information society. This is particularly so in the information age where the UK system of economic IP rights is similarly becoming an increasingly blunt tool, where convergence of technologies may lead to overlapping and unexpected legal complexities, and where information is increasingly becoming a unit of exchange. It is important to work towards certainty in an environment of legal uncertainty and increasing criminal penalties should not be considered unless the legal situation is more certain. The proposals in their current form are not what we term 'appropriate', 'affordable', or 'feasible'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having been an observer of public policy towards Crown copyright for a number of years now it is interesting to see just how far government has moved over the past decade in its stance on the issue. What began as a fairly entrenched viewpoint that Crown copyright was a necessary instrument of control over the process of official publication, seems now to have moved forward to a position that permits more radical thinking about the policy. Originally the enforcement of Crown copyright was seen as a means of maintaining control over the publication of the material, with a licensing policy for re-use and added-value exploitation by the private sector publishing industry. The private sector itself had long argued that the policy diminished prospects for the proper exploitation of official information. This it argued had had a detrimental effect, both for the industry itself and the degree to which the information might be used for the benefit of the national economy. Government began to listen to these arguments but HM Treasury consistently maintained the need for departments and agencies to recover costs and in some cases obtain profits from the distribution of official information. It was seen very much as a resource belonging to cost centres that should be exploited. Since the fall of the former Conservative Government it has become clear that those engaged in this debate are no longer as committed to these trenchant positions as they once were. Instead it would seem that a more open debate is underway within a broader reassessment of the nature, organization and functioning of the public services. This article explores the progress in that debate and assesses where the policy now stands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Open" initiatives, which focus on increasing access to education, resources, and research, are often practised by individuals rather than universities. However, universities must now produce openly accessible research to comply with research funding and assessment requirements. To encourage staff participation, universities need to understand what participation barriers their staff face. 67 University of the West of England staff were surveyed about how they understood and participated in open initiatives. Four staff gave qualitative interviews about their experiences. This data was analysed to find correlates for participation and to identify participation barriers. Participants valued open initiatives and supported their underlying goal of increased public access. Staff faced many entry barriers, especially around resource maintenance, copyright, and permissions. Universities could reduce these issues by emphasising how open initiatives allow staff to save time and to avoid reduplicating resources, and by creating unified "open policies" that make staff permissions and restrictions clearer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK copyright law regime presents the right to adapt as the sole, authoritative instrument in matters of legitimising translation; a legal “Big Other” conferring an otherwise unreal objective commodity status on what are instead always only ever individual and subjective acts of translation. Drawing primarily on the work of Theo Hermans, and the experiences of poet Jack Underwood in unsuccessfully attempting to formally translate poems by Mascha Kaléko, this article argues for (a) the development and (at the very least) implicit recognition of deviationist and subversive translative replies within – or at the very least alongside – the traditional UK legal schema and (b) a softening of the UK right to adapt by application of the integrity moral right to translations. In addition, a deeper quasi-Ungerian notion of institutional change that accommodates both principles (e. g. legitimate translations can, of course, be argued to exist, to which copyright accords) and counterprinciples (there are also, however, in the long term only multiple acts of translation, some preferred and commoditized, some existing outside that sphere, less functional and more creative/expressive but no less important and not to be prevented for those reasons) can also be advanced. Finally, a much broader critical point regarding the nature and role (or non-role) of law in the context of creative practices more generally can also be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: 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 length under the UK Copyright Act of 1814—in favor of books by dead authors—to examine the effects of longer copyright terms on price. We find that a doubling in copyright length was associated with a substantial (roughly 50%) increase in the price of books. Additional years of copyright improved publishers' ability to practice intertemporal price discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This abstract examines the challenges facing the UK publishing industry, as well as the opportunities brought by the advent of digital. The article makes reference to key facts and statistics which illustrate the value of the market, and the publishing market is discussed in terms of its categories: consumer publishing, academic and STM publishing, and children's publishing. The importance of copyright to the business and the developing role of the publisher are examined, as are industry initiatives taking place in the UK to help raise awareness of the diminishing bricks and mortar retail sector. The work performed by publishers and authors participating in initiatives tackling illiteracy and encouraging reading for pleasure as an activity is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The requirement by the UK government for evidence-based policy has recently been applied to copyright law in the context of I. Hargreaves’s report, Digital Opportunity: Review of Intellectual Property and Growth (Newport, Intellectual Property Office, 2011). In this article, I focus on data that have been used to make the case for copyright with government, but it is argued that this does not produce the evidence that is needed for policy purposes. The problem facing economists in providing such evidence is discussed in detail in connection with Hargreaves’ proposal for a digital copyright exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information about text mining, copyright, and barriers to innovation in the electronic publishing industry as of July 212. The discussion topics include the value and cost of copyright research and text mining and also two studies in Great Britain concerning intellectual property and the text mining market. Also noted is the Wellcome Trusts' survey of periodicals' open access articles.

The impact of evolving technology on those who create content and those who use it has raised many interesting copyright-related challenges that legislators, copyright experts, authors, publishers and licensing organizations around the world are looking to address. Several international initiatives underway highlight the evolving global copyright landscape, including a report commissioned by the UK government calling for the creation of a 'Digital Copyright Exchange.' Through such international efforts-and through the content licensing experience of collective management organizations-the best solutions to the copyright challenges of our time can deliver efficiency to everyone involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006 the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property made a series of recommendations for reforming the intellectual property regime to better serve the interests of both consumers and industry. Among the proposed recommendations was that an exception for parody be introduced within the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. In January 2008 the Intellectual Property Office (the IPO) launched the first part of a two-stage consultation process on exceptions to copyright. As part of that consultation process, the IPO proposed a ‘fair dealing style exception’ for parody, and sought views on whether a new exception should be introduced as well as what form it might take. In December 2009 the IPO launched the second stage of this consultation process. The second consultation document rejected the case for a new parody exception. This article considers the place of parody within the copyright regime and the objections levelled against the introduction of an exception set out within the IPO's second consultation document. It invites the IPO to reconsider its decision not to recommend the introduction of a specific exception for parody within the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the "cheap books hypothesis" of eighteenth-century British cultural history which argues that the copyright law decision of 1774 by Great Britain's House of Lords for Donaldson v. Beckett changed the purchasing and reading habits of Britain's middle class. The author argues that the decision made available multi-volume anthologies, but that the prices of books remained stable between 1750 and 1790. Other subjects considered include the used-book trade, British classic literature or literary canon, book auction catalogues, and British popular culture.

The history of publishing legal decisions (law reporting) in the UK has been that of a privatised system since its inception, and that history has encompassed several hundred years. The privatised nature of this has meant that the product (the law report) has been, except in limited cases, viewed as the property of the publisher, rather than the property of the court or public. BAILII is an open access legal database that came about in part because of the copyrighted, privatised nature of this legal information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) challenges the legal justifications underpinning Sergeant Talfourd's 1842 Copyright Extension Act. The novel does so by problematizing the logic of natural right, a logic adopted by proponents of copyright to defend further copyright extensions. Marlin Chuzzlewit's narrator attacks natural right through his representations of inheritance, repeatedly demonstrating how heirs subvert and appropriate testators' natural rights, and thus proving natural right to be a subjective, and even fictional, construct that can be adopted in potentially unjust ways. By destabilizing the logic of natural right, the narrator exposes the ways in which promoters of copyright employed inheritance as a metaphorical tool that allowed them to rationalize copyright extensions, and, in so doing, he threatens the institutions of inheritance, copyright, and authorship. Such a radical critique of intellectual property places Martin Chuzzlewit's narrative voice in conflict with Dickens's political persona and Dickens's avowed political aims, ultimately harming Dickens's, and other authors', own interests. In accounting for the paradoxical logic of natural right, however, Martin Chuzzlewit's narrator offers the most nuanced account of the problems of intellectual property that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World Book and Copyright Day was established by a resolution of the 28th General Council of UNESCO in 1995. Its avowed aim was ‘to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity.’ This article examines the context for World Book and Copyright Day, the extent to which cultural and commercial interests have converged in the activities of the day and argues that an analysis of the activities of the day reveal a specifically European attitude to book culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Library services for blind and visually impaired people (VIPs) have been inextricably tied up with alternative format production, which has never risen above 4 percent of standard-text publishing. The impact of digital publishing has been modest on Braille, modified print and audio; this partly results from production methods but also from defensive copyright in which the rights of authors outweigh consumer access rights. In this instance librarians should: assert customer rights against author rights; require piracy evidence; work towards a global digital accessibility library; and advocate a generic right to information. In a global digitally converged environment VIPs will need help with navigation, data evaluation and file migration; these needs will alter the traditional, neutral, role of librarians, transforming them into facilitators, covering what were traditionally described as broadcasting and telecommunications. The biggest single problem for VIPs will be the explosion of digital static and moving pictures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the issues surrounding the liability of end users of the Internet who use peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to communicate and transfer digital files to others throughout the world using the Internet. Part III begins by outlining the legal rights, obligations and liabilities of End Users and Owners in each of the U.S., Great Britain and Canada under the relevant legislation. Part III considers various arguments raised by the relevant players regarding End User liability for copyright infringement through the use of online P2P technology. Part IV examines various options to address the problems posed by file-sharing technology and the Internet including new or modified legislation.

Fair dealing is a concept which provides certain exceptions to UK copyright law; it permits the use of copyright material in certain circumstances without permission from, or payment to, the copyright owner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on copyright awareness and training for textile design protection in Great Britain. The article presents information on the integration of knowledge of the law into textile design training. The growing importance of design in textiles manufacture has been so apparent in the post-war period that one analysis claims that Great Britain has the largest number of education and training courses in textile and apparel design per capita in the world. While the education of designers has been evolving, there has also been a developing career structure for designers in Great Britain and foreign textile firms and a parallel, expanding freelance design sector. Customers can turn to fabrics in a cheaper price bracket if the patterns look similar to higher quality designs. This industry relies on design as a major factor in competition, and the legal right to defend original designs from piracy is a major factor in the security of legitimate business practice.