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"The scope and legitimacy of private copying is one of the most highly contested issues in digital copyright. While private copying was practiced in the analogue world too, it was tolerated due to its minimal impact and to the difficulties related to its monitoring. Yet, its permissibility is ambiguous in the digital environment; this is because digitalisation has enabled ordinary individuals to make and share copies of copyrighted works easily, for no cost and with no degradation in terms of quality. Scholars and lawmakers stress the decisive role of private copying in striking an adequate balance between the freedom to use copyrighted works and the protection of the rightholders' interests in the digital world. In Europe, private copying is explicitly permitted under Article 5(2)(b) of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society and the national laws that implement it. Despite being a lawful activity in the great majority of European Member States, digital private copying remains a highly controversial phenomenon and the scope of digital private copying remains legally unclear.This book offers an original analysis of private copying and determines the actual scope of private copying as an area of end-user freedom in the digital world. In particular, it examines the permissibility of digital private copying with a view to clarify the legal uncertainty as to its scope. The basis of this examination is Article 5(2)(b) of the Information Society Directive. Under this Article, the use of copyrighted works ought to be 'private' and 'non-commercial' to be permitted; these concepts, however, do not translate well, and tend to be less sharp, in the digital environment. Even though their meaning seems clear and self-evident, their legal boundaries are in practice very vague and not settled by law"--

This essay employs pornography to explore the politics of race, gender, and sexuality at play in mimetic performances of Bill Cosby's The Cosby Show. Focusing on Not the Cosbys XXX (2009), a pornographic parody of the sitcom, pornography is shown to be a venue that lays bare the politics of race, sexuality, and gender that energize cultural practices of mimesis. In mimicking The Cosby Show, Not the Cosbys XXX reveals the racial, sexual, and class politics of authenticity critical to mimesis as a salient technology for the (re)production of blackness in visual culture. Pornography's spectacular multiplex mimetic performance, which the author terms pornmimicry, brings the quotidian dynamics of mimicry into focus as a primary mode of identificatory performance. More than a frame to elucidate racial sexual performance in pornography, pornmimicry helps us to understand the concomitant pleasure (and violence) bound with the broader cultural repetition of blackness as itself a mimetic practice.

Copying, Creativity and Copyright – by Professor Ronan Deazley (Queen's University Belfast) and CREATe researcher Bartolomeo Meletti – offers insights into the creative process behind their award-winning film The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair, and makes the case for understanding copying as a positive phenomenon in helping us learn and innovate, develop and engage with others. Copying plays a crucial role at all stages of our development as human beings, from DNA replication to the way in which physical synchronicity helps us establish connections and relationships with friends and family, and beyond. Copying can also facilitate freedom of expression and political engagement, by enabling people and communities across the globe come together and speak with one voice. Consider, for example the global response to the killings in Paris at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine on 7 January 2015. Three simple words – Je Suis Charlie – have been copied (creatively and otherwise) and re-copied millions of times all over the world to commemorate those who lost their lives during that attack. This is copying as remembrance, free speech, solidarity and protest.

AbstractTypical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of 'convergent transformation', in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-random way. We present a series of stochastic models of cultural evolution investigating its effects. The results show that cultural stability can emerge and be maintained by virtue of convergent transformation alone, in the absence of any form of copying or selection process. We show how high-fidelity copying and convergent transformation need not be opposing forces, and can jointly contribute to cultural stability. We finally analyse how non-random transformation and high-fidelity copying can have different evolutionary signatures at population level, and hence how their distinct effects can be distinguished in empirical records. Collectively, these results supplement existing approaches to cultural evolution based on the Darwinian analogy, while also providing formal support for other frameworks – such as Cultural Attraction Theory – that entail its further loosening.Social media summary:Culture can be produced and maintained by convergent transformation, without copying or selection involved.