The Changing Regimes of Authorship

Papers in the workshop will seek to understand who represents creators and innovators, and who manages their rights and their revenue. The workshop will examine the significance of gender, for example in the repartition of the revenues of authors’ rights societies. Papers will question the share and importance of intellectual property among various kinds of revenue. Papers will also examine the challenges intellectual property rights pose for creators, and what are the norms beyond the law.

One ongoing discussion is about who captures value. The dematerialization of the cultural goods (through digital media, for example) has much impacted the creative industries. In the recent months, as a consequence of the Covid-19 crisis on the cultural and creative industries, questions of access by the publics to cultural goods, and of fair retribution of the creators, have been particularly urgent. The patterns of consumption of cultural goods and access to culture are profoundly disrupted by social distancing and isolation. For this reason, this workshop includes, on its second day, a panel on the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on the creative activity.

About CREATIVE IPR

The ERC Consolidator project “CREATIVE IPR: The history of Intellectual Property Rights in the Creative Industries” aims to study the history of the intellectual property rights, from the Paris Treaty (1883) and Berne Convention (1886) to the present day, with a focus on Europe in the global world.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) are a composite of laws that regulate the creations of the mind. These rights are of four types: patent, copyright, industrial property, and trademark. Creative workers and entrepreneurs usually rely on a portfolio of intellectual property rights – that is, a composite of several of these varieties of law – to protect their creations. The project approaches, from a historical vantage point, the various types of law that may protect the creative industries. The creative industries can be defined as covering “the creations of the mind”. They comprise cultural productions that are both high-brow and low-brow. CREATIVE IPR puts particular emphasis on two broad ensembles in the creative industries: (1) music and the arts of the stage; (2) design, fashion and luxury. These are not exclusive of broader, or more theoretical, approaches to intellectual property.