Methodology

From Copyright EVIDENCE

Guidelines for the cataloguing of copyright evidence where drawn up following a CREATe workshop on 20 October 2014, attended by Sayantan Ghosal (Dpt of Economics, University of Glasgow), Georg v Graevenitz (Queen Mary University of London & CREATe Fellow in Innovation Economics), Morten Hviid (Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia) and Ruth Towse (Bournemouth University & CREATe Fellow in Cultural Economics). Further consultations took place with Chris Buccafusco (New York University), Smita Kheria (University of Edinburgh), Joost Poort (Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam & CREATe Fellow in Economics of copyright and media industries) and Steven Watson (Lancaster University).

An initial selection of studies was drawn from four sources:

  1. A scoping review of the "piracy" literature commissioned by CREATe from Watson, Fleming and Zizzo, published in 2014. This used a review technique from the medical sciences to identify more than 50,000 academic sources that were potentially relevant for assessing unlawful file sharing, covering music, film, television, video games, software and books. During the review process, the sources were narrowed down to 206 articles which examined human behaviour.
  2. Working papers and pre-prints published in the SSRN e-journal Intellectual Property: Empirical Studies (edited by Christopher J. Buccafusco and David L. Schwartz). 710 papers published between November 1996 and July 2015 were narrowed down to 132 studies relevant to copyright law. These were further reviewed by the core editorial team of the Wiki (Erickson, Koutmeridis, Kretschmer) if they contained "sufficient empirical material" that warranted coding. "Sufficient empirical material" could be quantitative or qualitative. Our working definition excluded anecdotal or journalistic treatment, though single case studies were acceptable if the methodology was articulated and justified. A total of 103 studies were selected and catalogued from this SSRN source.
  3. Expert literature reviews conducted by Handke (2011), Kretschmer (2012) and Kheria (2013). They were used to fill some of the gaps left by the "piracy" review, in particular relating to creator perspectives. A total of 81 studies wereill be catalogued under this method.
  4. 50 governmental reports on intellectual property/copyright policy, proposed by CREATe doctoral candidates Kenny Barr and Megan Blakely, and reviewed by the core editorial team of the Wiki (Koutmeridis, Erickson, Kretschmer).

From 2014 to 2017, the Copyright Evidence Wiki was led by Theo Koutmeridis (lead editor), Kris Erickson and Martin Kretschmer. Research assistants coding entries were PhD candidates with CREATe, including Kenny Barr, Megan Blakely, Jaakko Miettinen, Victoria Stobo and Andrea Wallace. We have archived a version with GitHub that was produced under the responsibility of this team in January 2018, containing 593 studies.

Following the constitution of the editorial board in December 2017, a sub-editor was appointed, managing a new search-based process to identifying studies. Studies are now sourced using Google Scholar alerts for the following search strings:

“copyright” AND “empirical”

“copyright” AND “methodology”

“copyright” AND “qualitative”

“copyright” AND “quantitative”

The current editorial review process also allows all Wiki users to propose new studies.

All coding is performed by research assistants at CREATe, with the support of the AHRC Policy & Evidence Centre for the creative industries (PEC). We aim to catalogue 50 new studies per year. The editorial board’s processes ensure that the Wiki cannot be captured by any specific interests.

How to use and cite The Copyright Evidence Wiki

Most of the original content on the Copyright Evidence Wiki website is distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, meaning that you can share, remix, alter and build upon the Copyright Evidence Wiki content for any purpose as long as you credit the author of the content and redistribute your contributions under the same licence. Where content on the Copyright Evidence Wiki is not distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, this will be indicated clearly.

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Please cite the resource in the following way:

The Copyright Evidence Wiki: Empirical Evidence for Copyright Policy. CREATe Centre: University of Glasgow (http://CopyrightEvidence.org)

Please include the date when the resource was accessed. Please include the date when the resource was accessed.

If referring to the earlier version archived with GitHub [1] in January 2018, we suggest that the resource is cited in the following way: Koutmeridis, T., Erickson, K. & Kretschmer, M. (eds.) (2014-2017) The Copyright Evidence Wiki: Empirical Evidence for Copyright Policy.

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