Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy (CREATe)

Description

CREATe is the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre, an acronym for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology. It was established in 2012 as a result of a national competition for a centre focusing on "copyright and new business models in the creative economy". As the only UK research centre funded jointly by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), and ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), CREATe has developed an interdisciplinary research programme at the intersection of law, technology, social sciences, and humanities.

In 2017, CREATe received follow-on funding from the AHRC, and in 2018 and 2020, it won two large grants as part of the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) and the H2020 project "reCreating Europe: Rethinking digital copyright law for a culturally diverse, accessible, creative Europe". CREATe is now a research centre hosted by the School of Law at the University of Glasgow, a globally top-ranked law school. It provides resources and conducts new research of national and international significance as part of the University's Advanced Research Centre (ARC). Since a major research infrastructure award from the AHRC in March 2024, the centre organises its work around seven themes at the intersection of creativity, technology and markets: Dealing with Creators; Legal History and Cultural Memory; The Law of Innovation; Automation, Decentralisation and Platforms; Access to Knowledge; The Political Economy of Digital Regulation; and Digital Technologies and Humanism. Problem-focused research is supported by resource pages and tagged with disciplinary icons, allowing new priorities to emerge organically.

The work at CREATe is guided by three key principles:

1. Openness In a contested policy environment with limited evidence, CREATe adopts an open approach to synthesising knowledge from different fields. It actively involves users in research design at all stages and develops dynamic, open access resources. CREATe's resources receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per year from over 160 countries.

2. Interdisciplinarity CREATe recognises that the norms governing the information space are not just a legal problem. Research questions and policy issues require perspectives from multiple disciplines. CREATe projects typically involve collaboration and take into account empirical, historical, computational, cultural, sociological, or economic approaches. Within law, CREATe is anchored in the subject areas of intellectual property, information, and competition law.

3. Agility with a long view CREATe has the ambition to contribute to the big questions of today. In a fast-moving technological environment, sustained intervention requires taking a long view. CREATe aims to be responsive but not fast, and its policy contributions include EU and UK copyright policy, platform regulation, and broader questions of innovation, the creative economy, and the digital public sphere.

Artificial intelligence is now a central object of the centre's research. The centre maintains the AI Licence Tracker, which monitors the commercial agreements emerging between creative content providers and AI developers and gathers empirical data on the sectors affected and the nature of the content transacted; it grew out of the centre's response to the UK government consultation on the legal framework for AI and copyright, and it supplies evidence to live questions of AI policy. Teaching has followed the research, with a Postgraduate Certificate in AI Law and the Creative Economy offered alongside taught masters provision in intellectual property and the digital economy, technology law and regulation, and international competition law.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2012

Contact details

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University affiliation(s)

University of Glasgow
Glasgow

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