KEYNOTE PRESENTATION TO U21 GRADUATE RESEARCH CONFERENCE, SCHOOL OF MEDIA AND DESIGN, SHANGHAI JIAO TONG UNIVERSITY, SHANGHAI, CHINA, 10-12 JUNE 2015

1. 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

3. The Digital Challenge to Media Law
1. Unique attributes of digital information
2. Global nature of the Internet
3. Does Internet law exist?
– the “Law of the Horse”
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4. Media platform convergence
4Digital Media Research Centre

5. 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

6. 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.
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7. 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)
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8. 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)
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9. 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).
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10. 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).
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11. 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
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12. 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
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13. Issues arising
1. What is a media company? Google>? Apple?
Facebook?
2. Political economy of platforms
3. Regulatory parity between “old” and “new”
media
4. Equivalent treatment of media content
across platforms
5. Platform neutral regulation?
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14. The copyright balance
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15. Costs and benefits of a copyright
system
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16. 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
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17. 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).
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18. 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
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19. Copyright central to global debates
about digital creative economy
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20. 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
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21. Thank you
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