Defining authorship in user-generated content: Copyright struggles in The Game of Thrones

Abstract

The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator.

From Play to Political Action: Prosumerism on Fanvideo Meme Production

“…For the research corpus construction, a preliminary evaluation of fanvideos on YouTube was undertaken, leading to the identification of material produced based on three exemplary popular culture franchises: Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. The former achieved the status of the most emblematic television program in popular culture in the 2010s by adapting a literary saga (i.e., A Song of Fire and Ice) with a great resonance on the web (Milkoreit, 2019;Sarikakis, Krug, & Rodriguez-Amat, 2015). Also known as Wizarding World, the fictional universe originated in the Harry Potter book series has great prestige among fans around the world, not only for its literary content, but also for the films that adapt and expand its content (Martens, 2019;Souza-Leão & Costa, 2018).…”

Autoridades interpretativas: una perspectiva teórica sobre datificación y producción de sentido

“…Copyright o piratería (ver p. ej., Sarikakis et al, 2017); reconocimiento facial, protección de datos personales (p. ej. en niños, como en Lupton y Williamson, 2017); algorithmwashing o discriminación por diseño (p.…”

Malleable Games - A Literature Review on Communities of Game Modders

“…[36,62,63]). It is noteworthy that even after the (admittedly slow) change of mindset regarding how to deal with game mods from being against them to openly encouraging and even facilitating them, discussions about copyright conflicts still seem to be a timely issue [32,60]. There is certainly more to be said about legal aspects that concern the modifications of proprietary games, but considering the audience of the CT conference, we will instead focus on other topics such as motivation and community.…”