Follow-on Funding: Improving Deliberation, Improving Copyright

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The main aim of this project is to co-produce, with key stakeholder organisations and members of the public, a new deliberative model for consultations that can help policymakers to obtain better evidence to support copyright policymaking and potentially other areas of media policy. Our project objectives are: (1) to engage in dialogue with stakeholders about their experiences of copyright consultations and combine these insights with the findings of our own research; (2) to co-produce, with stakeholders, a new deliberative model of consultation for copyright policy that is robust, sustainable, and satisfies key democratic principles; (3) to share the model with the UK Intellectual Property Office as a tool for planning future consultations about copyright; (4) to explore with Ofcom the possibilities of using the model for consultations about other areas of media policy; and (5) to distribute the project outputs to relevant policymaking communities via the stakeholder and project team's networks.The proposal draws on the project team's previous research into how copyright is variously understood, communicated, and debated by different groups in society (see Klein, Moss and Edwards 2015). Most directly, it builds on a recent AHRC-funded study, 'Improving Deliberation, Improving Copyright' (AH/K000179/1), which explored how members of the public can be engaged in discussing copyright policy more effectively (Edwards, Moss, & Karvelyte, 2017). The project brought 88 members of the public together over one weekend to deliberate about copyright and ways it might change. Participants engaged enthusiastically with the event and greatly valued the opportunity to discuss copyright with one another, but they also wanted to understand and engage further with the perspectives of other key stakeholders, such as industry representatives and creative workers, and to know how their input could inform copyright policymaking. By working with all relevant stakeholders to consider how the public voice can be incorporated into policy consultations more effectively, this follow-on project addresses these points directly. To achieve our objectives, the project will adopt a creative and flexible approach that focuses on knowledge-sharing and exchange through project design, stakeholder engagement, and final outputs. The project begins with in-depth dialogues with stakeholder groups (creative workers, creative industry companies, intermediaries, regulatory bodies, relevant government departments, and members of the public), which will explore their experiences of consultation exercises and share the findings from our previous research. A one-day workshop will then bring stakeholders together in order to co-produce a draft model for deliberative copyright consultations. Our emphasis on co-production will ensure that the model will be jointly owned by all participants and provides a basis for developing a sustainable, realistic and more legitimate approach to copyright policymaking. The model and report will then be introduced to policymakers and consultation leaders at a training event for consultation planning. Stakeholders will join the researchers to present the model, talk about their experience during the project, and discuss the model's advantages and limitations. All the project outputs will be open access, made available via our project webpage for our stakeholders and other interested groups to reference and draw upon in future consultations.