Professor Kristofer Erickson
- Professor in Social Data Science, Affiliate (School of Law)
telephone:
0141 330 2360
email:
Kristofer.Erickson@glasgow.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1265-9123Biography
Kristofer Erickson is Professor of Social Data Science and Deputy Director for CREATE at the University of Glasgow, appointed in 2023. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK and Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow from 2013-2017. As part of the RCUK-funded CREATe Centre for Copyright and the Creative Economy, Kristofer leads empirical research in support of evidence-based policy making in the domains of technology regulation, access to knowledge, and creative industries.
Kristofer is an Academic Editor for Internet Policy Review, an open-access journal on Internet regulation published by the Alexander Von Humboldt Institute for Internet in Society. Kristofer is Co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Copyright Evidence Wiki, an open knowledge database of evidence about copyright’s effects in society and Copyright User, a digital learning resource for creative practitioners. He is a regular Programme Committee Member of the OpenSym conference, a global academic community focused on the research and practice of open collaborative systems.
Current and previous funded research projects include studies of copyright and the creative industries, user-led innovation and digital regulation. From 2023-2024 Kristofer was Principal Investigator on the study, Evidence on Technological Protection Measures: the impact on research, education and preservation. He was a Principal Investigator from 2015-2018 on EnDOW: Enhancing access to 20th Century Cultural Heritage through Distributed Orphan Works Clearance, a multi-country project to develop a crowdsourcing solution for copyright clearance in cultural institutions (project site). Kristofer was a Principal Investigator on the ESRC project, Valuing the Public Domain, which studied the uptake and circulation of expressions not in copyright (project site).
Research interests
My research is focused on the regulation of online interactions through law and social norms. I primarily work with quantitative research methods to empirically assess the impact of policy changes on online communities. Current topics of research interest:
Interoperability, standards and DRM
This research investigates the conditions under which organisations may adopt interoperability strategies. Further, what are the economics of interoperability for both producers and consumers? What are the economic effects of digital rights management (DRM) approaches, including technological protection measures (TPMs)? Sectors analysed include audio-visual media, the video game industry, libraries, archives and museums and volunteer collective initiatives.
Regulation of platform behaviour
The regulation of technology often involves the distribution of responsibilities and costs among different actors. This research investigates the effects of different governance approaches for participants in platform economies, for example the notice-and-takedown of user-generated content or the self-regulation of political advertising. Social norms may also play a role in shaping the behaviour of communities and interact with commercial incentives and legal rules.
Innovative communities and firms
This research examines the process of innovation by various types of actors, including commercial and non-commercial producers. What role does intellectual property play in the innovation process, and what is the optimal form of protection to promote various kinds of productive use? Activities include crowdfunding, remix, follow-on innovation, inward licensing, open licensing and creative commons.
Grants
Title: Evidence on Technological Protection Measures: the impact on research, education and preservation
Role: Principal Investigator
Funder: Knowledge Rights 21
Time period: 2023-2024
Project value: €70,000
This project analyses the status of technological protection measures (TPMs) in the Member States of the European Union and selected comparator jurisdictions. It analyses the impact of TPMs on research, education and preservation uses, and includes a survey of institutional users and their practices. The study includes ebooks, audio-visual media, online databases, music and video games.
Title: Unlocking co-creative possibilities: CREATe follow-on engagement with UK creative economy stakeholders to improve copyright practice and policy
Role: Co-Investigator
Funder: AHRC plus UofG ESRC/EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account
Time period: 2017-2019
Project value: £190,000
This follow-on project addressed under-represented stakeholder groups in the copyright policy making process, in particular micro-sized innovative firms and individual creators on digital platforms. As Co-chair and Editor of the Copyright Evidence Wiki, I oversaw creation of data-mining and visualization tools to assist wider stakeholder and policy uptake of this resource, hosted in the RCUK-funded CREATe Centre at the University of Glasgow. See: https://www.copyrightevidence.org/wiki/index.php/Copyright_Evidence
Title: ENDoW: Enhancing access to 20th Century Cultural Heritage through Distributed Orphan Works Clearance
Role: Principal Investigator, WP3
Funder: European Commission: Heritage Plus Joint Call
Time period: 2015-2018
Project value: €623,649
This multi-year (2015-2018) pan-European project developed a crowdsourcing platform to assist cultural institutions with copyright clearance for the purposes of mass digitization. I led the economic study and evaluation of crowdsourcing prototypes. The research design involved live simulation/observation to analyse quantitative data obtained from simulations of rights-clearance costs. See: https://bit.ly/3zPMB5I
Title: Valuing the Public Domain
Role: Co-applicant and Investigator
Funder: ESRC and Intellectual Property Office UK
Time period: 2013-2015
Project value: £104,000
This project explored how firms generate and capture value from ideas and expressions in the public domain. Managing a team of PhD research assistants, I used quantitative techniques to assess the role of different inputs in follow-on creativity, and estimate overall welfare provided by the public domain to the creative economy. Results were shared with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) See: https://www.create.ac.uk/valuing-the-public-domain-resource-page/
Title: Learning Tools for the Copyright User
Role: Principal Investigator
Funder: University of Bournemouth Impact Acceleration Account (IAA)
Time period: 2012-2014
Project value: £51,000
With co-applicants Martin Kretschmer and Bartolomeo Meletti, we designed a public resource for copyright education in the UK. Our website, the Copyright User portal provides accessible information about copyright law to small creators, SMEs and other non-lawyers. Professional animations and videos simplify complex legal and policy information. It has grown to encompass award-winning short videos and interactive tools, attracting over 1.4 million unique visitors since 2017. See: https://www.copyrightuser.org/
Title: Parody and Economic Impact for Music Rightsholders
Role: Principal Investigator
Funder: UK Intellectual Property Office
Time period: 2012-2013
Project value: £16,000 (Intellectual Property Office UK)
Economic research on the impact of user-generated parody for original rightsholders. I led the research design and managed a team of research assistants to collect a large dataset from YouTube about derivative uses of music by video parodists. In the published study, we found evidence of benefit to music rightsholders from parody on YouTube, and the findings were used to support a change to the UK law in October 2014, which created a new copyright exception for parodists. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4093789
A follow-up longitudinal study was later published on the removal of UGC videos over time: https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-9-1-2018/4680
Supervision
- Aljohani, Jumanah Ibrahim R
Navigating Freedom of Expression in the Age of Digital Regulation, The effect of Online Safety Act on Freedom of Expression.
Areas of supervision interest:
I am open to working with PhD students on topics related to intellectual property, open innovation, Internet regulation, online communities, copyright, and social norms.
Current PhD Students:
Jumanah Aljohani (FT) Navigating Freedom of Expression in the Age of Digital Regulation (Co-Supervised with Prof Gillian Doyle, CCPR, 2023 - 2026).
Previous supervisees:
Janet Burgess (FT) Layperson understandings of the law through creative practice: Choir music and copyright. (University of Glasgow, completed 2021).
Conor O’Kane (FT) ‘Experimental methods in behavioural economics to assess consumer perceptions of privacy in online transactions’. (Bournemouth University Business School, completed 2019)
Megan Blakely (FT), The Management of Intangible Cultural Heritage as Intellectual Property in Celtic Countries (University of Glasgow, completed 2018)
Andrea Wallace (FT) ‘Claiming Surrogate IP Rights: When Cultural Institutions Repossess the Public Domain’. (University of Glasgow School of Law, completed 2018)
Sheona Burrow (FT) (CREATe funded), Assessing the IP Small Claims Track (University of Glasgow, completed December 2017)
