Hot on the heels of our £100k donation to the Journalism Diversity Fund the Newspaper Licensing Agency is supporting another educational endeavour.
We are sponsoring a studentship at University College London to investigate the value of copyright to the creative industries in the digital age. Many content owners have been baffled by some of the calculations emerging from government enquiries in the last couple of years, claiming that exceptions to copyright will somehow stimulate a high-tech economy and end the recession! The most recent study from the IPO suggested that as far back as 2009 the value of copyright to the UK economy was £5.1bn, which was a huge increase on their previous estimate of £1.8bn, which by all accounts left many forms of copyright wealth creation out of the equation.
With that in mind the NLA is joining together with the Stationers' Foundation, Pearson plc, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and Euromonitor plc to bring some academic rigour to the debate. For more details, see this piece in the 1709 Blog. The studentship is expected to begin on 1 January 2013. For those seeking further details of the project, contact Professor Stevenson (i.stevenson@ucl.ac.uk).
David Pugh
Managing Director, NLA