shanghai jiao tong keynote 12 june 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Media Law, Regulation and Governance: Public Policy and the
Future of the Internet
PRESENTATION TO U21 GRADUATE RESEARCH CONFERENCE, SCHOOL OF MEDIA AND DESIGN, SHANGHAI
JIAO TONG UNIVERSITY, 10-12 JUNE 2015
Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Digital Media Research Centre
The Digital Challenge to Media Law
1. Unique attributes of digital information2. Global nature of the Internet3. Does Internet law exist?
– the “Law of the Horse”
Digital Media Research Centre
Internet Governance
• Internet governance is the development by governments, the private sector, and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, decision-making procedures and programs, that shape the evolution and development of the Internet.
Working Group on Internet Governance Digital Media Research Centre
Policy, Regulation and Governance• policy: goals and norms that inform and underpin relevant
legislation, and the intentions and instruments associated with shaping the structure and behaviour of actors within a bounded policy system (e.g. example media policy, telecommunications policy);
• regulation: operations and activities of specific agencies that have responsibility for oversight of the policy instruments that have been developed to manage a policy system (e.g. US Federal Communications Commission, Ofcom in the UK, Australian Communications and Media Authority);
• governance: the totality of institutions and instruments that shape and organise a policy system—formal and informal, national and supranational, public and private, large-scale and smaller-scale.
Des Freedman, The Politics of Media Policy (2008), pp. 13-14.
Digital Media Research Centre
Internet Governance in broad and narrow senses
• Narrow sense: ‘the ordering of whatever technical systems enable the operation of the global network of networks as a platform for applications’ (Solum 2009: 49)
• Broad sense: ‘The technical infrastructure of the Internet interacts with the ability of governments to regulate applications, content and human activities that are enabled and facilitated by use of the Internet. In other words, the technical infrastructure of the Internet is connected to the legal regulation of gambling and child pornography, to the efficiency and transparency of the world economic system, and to fundamental human rights, such as liberty of conscience and freedom of speech’ (Solum 2009: 50)
Digital Media Research Centre
Models of Internet governance
1. spontaneous ordering: regulation of conduct according to shared norms and values among user communities
2. transnational institutions and international governance 3. code and Internet architecture: design attributes of
internet hardware and software themselves regulate how it is used
4. national governments and law 5. market regulation and economics 6. hybrid models (e.g. self-regulation overseen by
independent agencies)
Digital Media Research Centre
Internet Governance
• The best models of Internet governance are hybrids that incorporate elements from all five models. Internet governance is a complex task requiring a complex set of regulatory mechanisms. As a result, the optimal system of governance is a combination of regulation by transnational institutions, respect for the architecture that creates transparency, national regulation, and markets (Solum 2009: 87).
Digital Media Research Centre
The Policy Challenges of Media Convergence
• ‘Australia’s policy and regulatory framework for content services is still focused on the traditional structures of the 1990s – broadcasting and telecommunications. The distinction between these categories is increasingly blurred and these regulatory frameworks have outlived their original purpose’ (Convergence Review 2012: vii).
• ‘The industry is going through fundamental change in technology, in business models and in corporate structures. It has become a single industry, thoroughly converged and integrated’ (Konrad von Finckenstein, Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Chair, 2012).
• ‘Lines are blurring quickly between the familiar twentieth-century consumption patterns of linear broadcasting received by TV sets versus on-demand services delivered to computers’ (European Commission, Preparing for a Fully Converged Audiovisual World: Growth, Creation and Values, 2013 Green Paper, p. 1)
• ‘Policy and regulatory frameworks which were designed for traditional media platforms and industry structures are no longer able to cope with the characteristics of the converged media environment’ (Singapore Media Development Authority, 2012, p. 5).
Digital Media Research Centre
What is Convergence?
1. Technological – combination of communication, computing and media content (Three C’s)
2. Economic – digitally-based media conglomerates and the digital conversion of traditional media
3. Social – user-created content; multi-screen media
4. Textual – content re-use and transmedia storytelling
Digital Media Research Centre
Related changes
• Ubiquitous high-speed broadband access• Globalisation of media platforms, content and
services• Accelerated platform/service innovation• Proliferation of user-created and pro-am
media content• Blurring of public-private and age-based
distinctions in media access
Digital Media Research Centre
Issues arising
1. What is a media company? Google>? Apple? Facebook?
2. Political economy of platforms3. Regulatory parity between “old” and “new”
media4. Equivalent treatment of media content
across platforms5. Platform neutral regulation?
Digital Media Research Centre
New complexities of copyright
1. Low cost digital reproduction and distribution (Internet, 3D printing)
2. Growing economic importance of IPRs
3. Copyrighted products and global popular culture
4. Globalisation of copyright and IP law
Digital Media Research Centre
Copyright and the creative industries
• ‘Societies that are open … assume that individual expressions of a literary and artistic nature should be freely shared as part of ordinary discourse … [as] our contribution to a conversation’ (John Howkins, The Creative Economy 2001, p. 55).
• ‘The principle that people deserve to be rewarded for their creative efforts, and will only do so if they are rewarded, and that society as a whole benefits if the resulting creations and inventions are put into the public domain and made freely available’ (John Howkins, The Creative Economy 2001, p. 28).
Digital Media Research Centre
The Digital Economy Challenge
• Creative industries policy makers have tended to be defensive about impact of new digital platforms (Bakhshi, Hargreaves and Mateos-Garcia, 2013 on UK case)
• Impact of digital distribution has been high on incumbent CIs, but has made digital content more widely available – business model innovation
Digital Media Research Centre
Global copyright debates
• Vast bulk of IPRs held in small number of countries
• Piracy may be a rational response to such inequalities of access BUT
• Very hard to develop local creative industries in the absence of copyright/IPR protections
Digital Media Research Centre