Managing Content in a Platform Economy: Copyright-Based Approaches to User-Generated-Content

The active participation of users in the process of creating and disseminating creative content is one of the fundamental principles characterizing today’s media environment. Especially since digital devices and social media have become available on a broad scale, the role of users has transformed from mere passive recipients to pro-actively engaged ‘prosumers’. From a copyright perspective, prosumer activity is vividly demonstrated in the prevalence of User-Generated-Content (UGC), which describes the phenomenon of users creating and sharing creative content on digital platforms (such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) or contributing to open source projects and wikis for personal, mainly non-commercial purposes. This development has a severe impact on traditional value chains of the creative industry and yields new business models at the same time. Against this background, this paper discusses different options for rightholders to manage their dissemination strategy under the current European copyright framework.