Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how the Biography of Artefacts & Practices approach can guide empirical analysis of an emerging infrastructure for managing Intellectual Property: the Copyright Hub. Triangulating between different stakeholder viewpoints and moments it tracks the dynamics and development trajectory.

Paper long abstract:

The Copyright Hub is a UK-based initiative for streamlining copyright licensing. Originating as a side recommendation in Hargreaves Review (2011) of the UK's Intellectual Property framework, the Hub has soon turned from a vague idea of a centrally-controlled Digital Copyright Exchange into a full-fledged sociotechnical project, which attracts the attention of policy makers, copyright practitioners and creative industries far beyond the UK. The development of the Copyright Hub, consequently, is neither confined to a single locale/ moment of innovation nor one actor, but instead being conducted by various actors across multiple sites in an extended timeframe. Conventional approaches in STS, such as snap-shot studies and actor-centred accounts of technology development, are therefore inadequate for capturing, let alone analysing and portraying, the richness of this case study.

To tackle this challenge, we adopt the Biography of Artefacts and Practices (BoAP) perspective, which provides us with an analytical framework for conducting longitudinal, multi-sited studies. Our fieldwork consists of twenty-month study of the Copyright Hub in the UK and a number of shorter studies conducted in South East Asia. Based on archival materials, oral histories and semi-structured interviews, we find that the Copyright Hub continuously evolves through a series of interactions, alignment and misalignment of interests between various stakeholders involved in different stages of the project. The paper not only demonstrates the strengths of BoAP perspective in studying innovation, but also gives insights into the practicality of applying it to research under limited resources, as in the case of doctoral study.