The
changing media landscape, locally and globally, brings with it certain
challenges and opportunities for law and for media law in particular. As
we could repeatedly see, it is very often the case that the toolbox of
media regulation has not been yet adjusted (or not appropriately
adjusted) to the changed (and changing) environment of 'old' and digital
media, of convergence, of new patterns of business and consumer
behaviour and new modes of cultural content production, distribution and
access.
There
is a host of topics that would qualify as falling under the broad
category of challenges and opportunities to media law. We will only be
able to tackle a tiny bit of those.
With
the purpose of balancing the overall contents of the course and
addressing some issues that were not sufficiently discussed until now,
we would take up some of the themes in the domain of copyright and at
the intersection of intellectual property and media law. We will pay
specific attention to the processes of expanding copyright at the
national, regional and global levels, and at the so-called copyright
wars against the so-called piracy. In this context, we will discuss what
the repercussions of expanded copyright may be and whether creativity
and innovation as the ultimate goals of intellectual property protection
are properly served. We will also look at alternative ways of
protecting authors' rights such as the creative commons licence, as well
as at initiatives that pursue to set limits to the ever expanding
copyright.
A
case that could well exemplify the current state of the debates is the
Google Book Settlement and we'll make use of it to situate our analysis
in the broader framework of media, access to knowledge and media
regulation meant to serve the public interest.
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