About Jason Rutter

Jason Rutter is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School for Mass Communication Research, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven where his research is focused primarily community and the piracy of digital content. He has been involved in projects funded by the European Commission, Northern Ireland Office, NESTA, DTI and ESRC and published widely including the books Understanding Digital Games (2006, Sage) and special editions of Game Studies (2003) and Information, Communication and Society (2003). His recent projects include ‘COUNTER: Socio-economic and cultural impacts of the consumption of counterfeit goods (EC)’, ‘Hidden Innovation in the Creative Sectors’ (NESTA), ‘Intellectual Property Theft and Organised Crime’ (NIO) and ‘Mobile Entertainment Industry and Culture’ (EC). He chaired the European Commission Marie Curie Conference ‘Putting the Knowledge Based Society into Practice’ (April 2006) and the international conferences ‘Mobile Entertainment: User Centred Perspectives’ (2004) and ‘Playing with the Future’ (2002) as well as running the ESRC-funded seminar series “DigiPlay: Experience and Consequence of Technologies of Leisure”. He was the inaugural vice-president of the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA).

STEVO is a 24 month project taking a user-focused look at the the use and downloading of copyrighted content from the internet.

Funded through a fellowship to Dr Jason Rutter from the European Commission’s Marie Curie Action: “Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development”, it explores the changing relationships between intellectual property (IP) owners and consumers and the tensions which have developed between control and access is being negotiated and, at times, resisted.

The project will look at how messages concerning the management and protect of intellectual property are negotiated by users and the role the play in generating new intellectual property through generating new content for consumption.

The research, which is hosted by the School for Mass Communication Research at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, is focused on the routine and everyday nature of downloading where, for a wide demographic range of consumers, the piracy of digital products has become normalised and accepted as part of being an enthusiast.

STEVO will explore weaknesses in assumptions previously made about the consumption of counterfeit goods, namely that:

• it can be simply linked to user income;
• maximisation of utility can satisfactorily explain user behaviour;
• it is a practice limited to young consumers;
• that unlicensed use of IP is always detrimental to competitiveness.

STEVO gets its name not from someone called Steve but from its full title, ‘The Socio-Technical EVOlution of intellectual property online: Creating counterfeit culture’. The project is running from 1st November 2009 until 31st October 2011.