session 12. challenges and opportunities for contemporary media law.

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.

Optional reading:
Neil W. Netanel, Why Has Copyright Expanded? Analysis and Critique

The slides for session 12 are here.