User generated content and its authors

User generated content (UGC) may not be a novel form of creativity but it does present us with a conceptual category that has come to relatively recent, and sometimes spectacular, prominence because of the easy dissemination of such content online. UGC is ‘new’ in offering a primarily social approach to creative production. The copyright implications of UGC have been addressed within the literature largely in relation to the question of exceptions to infringement: this chapter considers the challenges which UGC poses to the operation of copyright rules regarding authorship and the subsistence of copyright.