Unexpected Media

Copyright: framing government policy

I’ve been doing some work with the UK Government’s Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) which was established around a year ago to advise ministers on creating frameworks for regulation.  I was invited to help design and facilitate an idea generation session involving representatives of industry and consumer organisations looking at consumer attitudes and behaviours in the online world.

As preparation for the workshop SABIP commissioned a research team at University College, London to undertake a literature review of publicly available research into what people are actually doing and their attitudes to copyright.  This included this report, commissioned by Marrakesh Records from media consultancy Human Capital which makes chilling reading for businesses which generate revenue by selling recorded music: “we find that the majority would even sacrifice sex for music. And yet music is increasingly becoming a commodity for which young people do not expect to pay.”

One of their major findings is that all the serious surveys into how people behave towards copyright material in the digital world has looked at young people under the age of 23, mostly students at universities in the mid-west. There is very little evidence about the attitudes of older demographics.

As one part of the workshop, I had the delegates build a map of the media ecology in which government is now reframing regulation for intellectual property in the creative industries. The delegates were asked to identify key factors shaping the new media landscape and then create ‘tag-clouds’ indicating the major issues. This is what they produced:

Landscape for intellectual property regulation in the UK