Much academic research and industrial development explores new ways to create greener and environmentally friendlier chemicals and materials for a variety of applications. A significant part of this work focuses on the development, processing and manufacturing, recycling and disposal of green plastics, adhesives, polymer composites, blends and many other industrial products from renewable resources. Natural fibres offer the potential to deliver greater added value, sustainability, renewability and lower costs especially in the automotive industry. Further research involves the fibre crop production. The everincreasing volume of scientific literature refers with enthusiasm to the potential of natural fibres in technological, economic and ecological terms. This enthusiasm tends to also expand to the areas of human life and socio-economic development for the fibre crop growers and their communities. However, there is very little debate or evidence to support statements about the assumed advantages for the affected population in rural areas. We argue that despite the predicted new boom in the demand of natural fibres, it is unlikely that this will represent a real improvement in the quality of life of crop fibre growers and their communities. This paper examines the experience of Mexico as a case study and argues that only through consistent political will and co-operation between governments, industry, scientists, consumer groups and local communities, as well as a suitable economic strategy such as local subsidies, a truly sustainable economic development, social equity and improved environmental quality will be achieved for tens of thousands of natural fibre growers.

This article explores the ways in which the concept of privacy is understood in the context of social media and with regard to users' awareness of privacy policies and laws in the 'Post-Snowden' era. In the light of presumably increased public exposure to privacy debates, generated partly due to the European "Right to be Forgotten" ruling and the Snowden revelations on mass surveillance, this article explores users' meaning-making of privacy as a matter of legal dimension in terms of its violations and threats online and users' ways of negotiating their Internet use, in particular social networking sites. Drawing on the concept of legal consciousness, this article explores through focus group interviews the ways in which social media users negotiate privacy violations and what role their understanding of privacy laws (or lack thereof) might play in their strategies of negotiation. The findings are threefold: first, privacy is understood almost universally as a matter of controlling one's own data, including information disclosure even to friends, and is strongly connected to issues about personal autonomy; second, a form of resignation with respect to control over personal data appears to coexist with a recognized need to protect one's private data, while respondents describe conscious attempts to circumvent systems of monitoring or violation of privacy, and third, despite widespread coverage of privacy legal issues in the press, respondents' concerns about and engagement in "self-protecting" tactics derive largely from being personally affected by violations of law and privacy.

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The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator.