D4.6. Interim report on negative space of EU creative industries

The project reCreating Europe examines stakeholders’ perspectives on European copyright regulatory framework to promote a creative, diverse, and accessible Europe. Work Package (WP) 4 – Creative industries focuses the interplay between copyright regulation and creative industries incentive structures and business models.

In particular, Task 4.2 – New business models in the European creative industries includes three subtasks aiming at: (i) studying business models of small and micro creative firms(Subtask 4.2.1), (ii) providing detailed case studies of negative IP spaces in European creative industries (Subtask 4.2.2), and (iii) investigating the effect of creative hubs on gentrification (Subtask 4.2.3). This interim report presents the progresses of Subtask 4.2.2.

Studies on the so-called ‘negative Intellectual Property (IP) spaces’ have steadily grown in recent years. The existing literature has mainly focussed on gathering multifaceted empirical evidence on the field, and the few theoretical approaches to the field provide a plurality of definitions of negative IP. In order to navigate systematically this rich but heterogeneous literature, this report provides:

1) a genealogy of the concept of ‘negative IP space’ taking into consideration contextual debates in a number of other scholarly fields; 2) an assessment of the definitions of negative IP provided so far; 3) a systematic literature review; 4) on the basis of this discussion, the report puts forward a possible new taxonomy of negative IP spaces based on a structural analysis of the creative and innovative sectors investigated in the literature. A few final remarks conclude the discussion.

As of M18 of the project, the researchers involved in the subtask have completed the whole preparatory work before the case studies. This interim report presents a taxonomy which will provide a yardstick for the identification and research design of the case studies which will be developed in months 18-36 of Subtask 4.6.2., leading to D.4.7.

Please note: a screen-reader accessible version of this report can be downloaded via this link https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1Q1jGGKhV_dolaOpvq2OH_7NOSFbtQKTe