CREATIVE IPR examines how the creative industries have used intellectual property historically. The period studied in the project extends from the signature of the Paris Convention on industrial property in 1883 and of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1886 to the present. Intellectual property rights are a group of rights that include copyright, trademark, patent, industrial design, to which are often added fair competition, anti-trust, and trade secrets. CREATIVE IPR examines the meaning of intellectual property rights for creators, publics, and administrations in twentieth century Europe and their global reach. The project seeks to understand who captured economic value from intellectual property, and which actors failed to do so. In order to answer these questions, CREATIVE IPR examines the macro and the micro aspects of the management of intellectual property rights.
CREATIVE IPR pursues the questions in three arenas. The first arena is the formation and impact of national and international institutions and organizations for intellectual property. The second arena is the role of intellectual property rights in the arts of the stage and music. The third arena is the place of intellectual property in the fashion, design, and luxury industries. For each arena, the researchers in the project are examining five cross-cutting themes: authorship and creativity, firms and business history, technological change and innovation, legal frameworks, and the role of the commons or the public domain. Each of these themes is the focus of one of the project's workshops, and in addition two international conferences bring the transversal themes and work packages together.
CREATIVE IPR examines the micro level of the creators, and the macro level of international organizations in work package 2. The specificities of the implementation of intellectual property in the creative industries however, do not always appear in the history of the international conventions and their management by international organisations. Research in CREATIVE IPR also includes a meso level, examining the implementation of intellectual property by European countries internationally and historically, for instance in the case of colonies. The meso level provides an understanding of which varieties of intellectual property rights created opportunities for the creative industries. An important observation in the project is that copyright offered some space of opportunity for lesser-represented creators, but that patents did not offer similar opportunities.
Research in the project shows that although music and the arts of the stage (the focus of work package 3) are considered to be "copyright industries" heavily relying upon intellectual property rights as a source of revenue and ownership, those industries have been vulnerable to technological change and recently, to the Covid-19 pandemic. Conversely, the fashion and luxury industries, examined in work package 4, are often thought to make lesser use of intellectual property. CREATIVE IPR results nuance this point, showing that fashion and luxury entrepreneurs have used a variety of intellectual property rights in a comprehensive manner.
