Brief for the Symposium

Copyright has become a controversial issue: having once been the concern of a few specialised lawyers and businesses in the creative industries, such as film and sound recording, that could be consulted relatively easily, it now regulates a huge range of creative activities both professional and amateur and all those consuming their output. Now everyone has a stake in the way the law works. That has brought copyright to the attention of economists, sociologists and academics working in cultural and media studies and each discipline has somewhat different criteria for evidence, all of which may have validity for policy purposes. In addition, the law has changed to adjust to new technologies of production and consumption and continues to be changed, requiring discussion of what is appropriate to satisfy a broad range of societal interests as well as to promote beneficial technical change. The advance of digitization and internet distribution have called into question whether copyright can be adapted in a way that is acceptable to all these stakeholders and what the impact of changes will have on creators, the industries supporting them and those using and consuming their products.

Even the purpose of copyright has come into question. Some would see copyright as a means of enabling authors and performers to earning a reward for their creativity, skill and talent while others view it as a means of supporting the industries that exploit them by bringing that work to market. Some regard this as being achieved harmoniously and others see hard bargaining as the only way. New kinds of licensing and new ways of administering copyright have become possible with digitization. Government attitudes have also shifted with the increasing promotion of the creative and knowledge economy as a source of growth and employment in a post-industrial era. That stance emphasises the economic importance of copyright in these industries.

It is in this context that this Symposium was organised on 8 November 2012, as part of the ESRC Social Science Festival. The purpose of the event was to scrutinise the ambition of evidence-based policy and consider its relevance to copyright policy. The organisers, Professor Ruth Towse of the Centre for IP Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University and Professor Martin Kretschmer of CREATe, the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models at the University of Glasgow (and formerly director of CIPPM), have emphasised the need for empirical evidence in their academic research and consultation on copyright, which has included the effects of copyright policy on creators' and performers' earnings, on the operation of the creative industries and on copyright institutions such as collecting societies. In 2010/11, Martin had a one year ESRC-funded internship at the IPO and has subsequently conducted several empirical studies for the IPO (Kretschmer, 2011; Erickson, Kretschmer & Mendis, 2013; Homberg, Favale & Kretschmer, 2013) and Ruth has published several papers evaluating the state of economic evidence on copyright in the academic literature, one commenting on the IPO's own figures on the Hargreaves recommendations and another on the digital copyright exchange (DCE) proposal (Towse, 2011, 2012).

The Symposium took the form of several panels of specific groups: policy-makers, stakeholders, social scientists and law professors with an open session to enable wider audience participation. The whole day was tightly focused on one, and only one question: What constitutes evidence? It was emphasised that it was not about good copyright policy (what the law ought to be), but about the nature of evidence. Each panel speaker was asked to give a short opening statement, setting out what constitutes evidence from their disciplinary perspective, using the IPO's guidance document on standards of evidence ('clear, verifiable and able to be peer-reviewed') as a starting point to agree or disagree with.

A set of specific sub-questions was asked:

(i) To what extent does the question matter to which evidence is sought?

(ii) Is the past a guide to the future?

(iii) Is anecdotal evidence bad evidence? When is an anecdote a counter-factual?

(iv) Are numbers better evidence? If not, why not?

(v) How do you weigh arguments? Are there formal trade-offs?

(vi) Are appeals to shared values evidence?

The responses to the Hargreaves Copyright Consultation (2011), and the official summary thereof were circulated as prior reading. Another recent policy initiative discussed at the Symposium was the UK Cabinet Office's open standards consultation where Favele & Kretschmer (2012) attempted to contribute an analysis of consultation responses using social science methods.

The intention to produce digital proceedings of the Symposium was clear from the beginning, in order to create a citeable source that may form an orientation point in the heated debate around copyright reform. A light form of peer review took place by circulating full transcripts for review and comment, checking research cited in the discussion, and adding a bibliography.