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Understanding Copyright Law in Online Creative Communities

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Copyright law is increasingly relevant to everyday interactions online, from social media status updates to artists showcasing their work. This is especially true in creative spaces where rules about reuse and remix are notoriously gray. Based on a content analysis of public forum postings in eight different online communities featuring different media types (music, video, art, and writing), we found that copyright is a frequent topic of conversation and that much of this discourse stems from problems that copyright causes for creative activities. We identify the major types of problems encountered, including chilling effects that negatively impact technology use. We find that many challenges can be explained by lack of knowledge about legal or policy rules, including breakdowns in user expectations for the sites they use. We argue that lack of clarity is a pervasive usability problem that should be considered more carefully in the design of user-generated content platforms.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    February 2015
    1956 pages
    ISBN:9781450329224
    DOI:10.1145/2675133
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 28 February 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. copyright
    2. creativity
    3. fanworks
    4. intellectual property
    5. law
    6. online communities
    7. policy
    8. remix
    9. user-generated content

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    CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;
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    Cited By

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    • (2024)"Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation PoliciesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642333(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Mining, Scraping, Training, GeneratingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.100961:1(68-79)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
    • (2023)THE PROTECTION OF ARTISTIC WORK UNDER INDIAN COPYRIGHT LAWShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts10.29121/shodhkosh.v4.i2.2023.23614:2Online publication date: 31-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100957:CSCW2(1-21)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Multi-Platform Content Creation: The Configuration of Creator Ecology through Platform Prioritization, Content Synchronization, and Audience ManagementProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581106(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Unpacking Stitching between Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons: Barriers to Cross-Platform CollaborationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35557666:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Generating Practices: Investigations into the Double Embedding of GDPR and Data Access PoliciesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556316:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Channeling End-User Creativity: Leveraging Live Streaming for Distributed Collaboration in Indie Game DevelopmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551736:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Moderation of Deliberation: How Volunteer Moderators Shape Political Discussion in Facebook Groups?Social Computing and Social Media: Design, User Experience and Impact10.1007/978-3-031-05061-9_43(602-616)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
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