The Game Is ON!

The Game is On! is a series of short animated films that put copyright and creativity under the magnifying glass of Sherlock Holmes, providing a unique, research-led and open access resource for school-aged learners and other creative users of copyright. Drawing inspiration from well-known copyright and public domain work, as well as recent copyright litigation, these films provide a springboard for exploring key principles and ideas underpinning copyright law, creativity, and the limits of lawful appropriation and reuse.

Each episode is accompanied by a number of related Case Files, supplementary educational materials aimed at suggesting points of discussion about copyright for teachers and students. In the various Case Files that accompany the six episodes of The Game is On! – 33 in all – we explore a wide range of issues relating to core aspects of copyright law. For a basic overview of the economic rights that copyright owners enjoy, see Case File #0 – Some Copyright Basics and its accompanying Teaching Note. The six episodes of The Game is On! series – together with the Case Files, Teaching Notes and Annotated Scripts – are available below.

John Watson’s Dispatch Box

John Watson’s Dispatch Box is a set of teaching resources aimed at pupils aged 11-18. The resources – commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office and developed by Ronan Deazley and Bartolomeo Meletti – are designed to enable the development of core thinking skills as well as teaching activities across a range of subjects, including English Language and Literacy, Media, Law and Art. Relevant links to all four curricula (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) are mapped out in Curriculum Links.

A set of Teaching Notes (PDF 8.3 MB) – one for each Case File – aim to help teachers design and deliver engaging lessons. In addition to clearly defined teaching aims and key questions, many of the individual Teaching Notes include Suggested Activities, such as developing and pitching ideas for a TV or film production, or organising a mock trial. The Teaching Notes can be downloaded individually below each film.

The resource also includes An Introduction to Copyright (PDF 4.7 MB) (a quick and easy introduction to copyright), Understanding Copyright: A Handbook for Teachers (PDF 3.6 MB) (a more comprehensive, authoritative and user-friendly handbook on UK copyright law), and Curriculum Links (PDF 5.1 MB) (a document mapping how the resource relates to your curriculum). Finally, with Create it Yourself: The Game is Still On! (PDF 4.5 MB) students can explore and indulge their creative and imaginative abilities. Drawing on all six films, students can continue the story in their own words, or, by using the vector files of our own character sheets and illustrations, they can even edit our films or perhaps create their own!

Creative Process

To produce The Game is On!, we adopted appropriation as a creative technique. You can explore our creative process through the storyboards of all six episodes and a set of Annotations, which identify and explain the many and varied sources that have influenced the writing, design, animation and scoring of each film. You can find the annotated scripts below each corresponding film, or you can access them all here.

Copying, Creativity and Copyright – a CREATe Working Paper by Ronan Deazley and Bartolomeo Meletti that offers insights into the creative process behind 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.