Sunday, 13 February 2011

Are you an ordinary internet user? Do you use what you find online? If so, read on ...

Are you Mr?Ms  Average? If so,
 this survey is just for you!
1709 Blog team member Aurelia tells us that Simone (a colleague of hers who hails from Italy) is doing some research for his PhD. His goal is to survey people who are casual technology users (i.e. not devoted geeks, nerds and obsessives) about their ideas of how creative works like pictures, music and writing are used on the internet. Says Aurelia, "It would be very helpful if you could take just a few minutes and fill out Simone's survey at http://www.aliprandi.org/en/survey".

This would be useful not only for Simone but also for those good folk at Creative Commons who do try to get their terms to reflect the way people use materials online, their expectations and their aspirations.

Simone provides a little further explanation of this legal/sociological survey, which is entitled "Copyright in the digital age: attitudes, social perception and level of awareness".
"The questionnaire takes approximately 15 minutes to complete; it is online and completely  anonymous (we do not ask your name and we do not record your IP address; so please relax and sincerely answer the questions). The results of this research will be included in my Ph.D. thesis and
made available with an open access/copyleft approach. Every person's participation is important in order to accomplish my research, so I hope that you will be able to dedicate the time to answer the survey. It would also be very useful and appreciated if you could share this announcement with your friends and colleagues".
Now's the chance for all you casual and non-addicted twitterers, facebookers and bloggers to do Simone a favour -- tell your friends!
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3 comments:

  1. John R walker14 February 2011 at 02:09

    Jeremy I have just done the survey. Feel it could have asked a bit more about people for whom ' free' distribution is free advertising.

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  2. Anonymous15 February 2011 at 13:05

    Very problematic questions/statements in this. e.g.

    "a system that does not respect copyright" - surely persons do or do not respect copyright, not systems. Systems can respect requests or intentions of rights owners, but cannot independently respect copyright.

    "You need a new software for your computer. What do you do?" - no option here for "download the freely available version from the official website"

    "Some people think that copyright should be enforced even though this could limit new forms of fruition of creative contents born with the coming of the Internet. Do you agree with this statement?" - leading question

    "Have you ever thought that copyright law and the control activity for its respect were somehow limiting your rights as a citizen of the Internet?" - surely this is what copyright law de facto does, as any negative right...

    "How often do you connect to the Internet to get digital creative works (movies, music, software, pictures, videogames...)?"/"Many questions will refer to the concept of “digital creative works, i.e. all creative products that are protected by copyright and that can be shared and purchased in digital format (such as music, films, images, texts as well as video games and software)." - read broadly, "getting digital creative works" could easily include "reading Jeremy's blog", whish then does not fit with the tenor of the remaining questions, which seem to deal with packaged, discretely downloadable works...

    I gave up half way because I felt that my answers could not fit the responses usefully.

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  3. John R walker16 February 2011 at 00:29

    Because modern copyright issues are often essentially fights over definitions of terms, the problems Anonymous outlines are perhaps inevitable. What the term 'Copyright' actually means has essentially become an ideological/political issue , it is no longer a simple commercial matter

    The survey was clearly aimed at sampling public attitudes to the very gray areas around obtaining 'things' without payment that the web has created.


    Being a visual artist, I come from a very old ( financially viable) open source tradition,I was struck by the fairly narrow focus and lack of recursive awareness , behind the questions.

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