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Thursday, August 07, 2008

Essay: New Media in Old Bottles?

Neil Netanel

I have posted on SSRN an essay entitled, "New Media in Old Bottles? Barron's Contextual First Amendment and Copyright in the Digital Age," which explores in more depth some of the themes that I have discussed in my posts. In the essay I begin with Jerome Barron's call, four decades ago, for access to media as a First Amendment right as a springboard for examining copyright and its role in shaping public discourse in the digital arena. I focus, in particular, on (1) incumbent mass media's untoward use of copyright as a vertical restraint to stifle the new media that provides platforms for peer speech; (2) copyright's continuing part in underwriting traditional media, which I argue is a salutary function that stands in some tension with the media's use of copyright to suppress new media competition; and (3) copyright's potential for enabling powerful new media, like Google, to threaten expressive diversity in the digital age in much the same way that incumbent media has overwhelmingly dominated public discourse in the print and broadcast era. The full abstract and essay can be found here.

Comments:

I was pleased to find the GWLR article, as well as to learn of the author's work in copyright and first amendment interpretations. First impressions, with respect to news sourcing, include a need to examine the concerns about Google from the political standpoint as a linkage which young web browsers favor compared to old newsprint formats. Additionally, it seems one of the new dynamics in news, while relying centrally perhaps upon the old newsprint media's online publication of investigative and breaking news journalism, is, nevertheless, the historic feature of copyright rules as designed in an era when individual research was much more segmented than in these canine-pack days of howling open source 'development' of new ways to interpret 'news'. Further, there are feedbacks among these antipodes, a synergy, if you will. I suspended writing in locations which consistently resulted in my concepts' appearing in US Senate speeches the following morning without any permissions asked or received; people get paid to write and research at that level. Yet, the entire new media mix is promising, and, the paper published, interesting.
 

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