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This paper investigates the current turbulent state of copyright in the digital age, and explores the viability of alternative compensation systems. The paper critically appraises the increased recourse to digital rights management (DRM) technologies, which are designed to restrict access to and usage of digital content. Considerable technical challenges associated with DRM systems have necessitated increasingly aggressive recourse to the law. A number of controversial aspects of copyright enforcement are discussed and contrasted with those arising from alternative levy-based compensation systems. This paper undertakes consideration of alternative models for managing the copyright bargain in the digital era.

This paper tracks the development of critical communications research in Australia over a 30- year period. It assesses the relative significance of critical theory, Marxist political economy and cultural studies to the development of such a tradition, linking this to distinctive elements of Australian politics and culture, particularly the weakness of the institutional left and the significance of populism as a mode of political engagement. The paper also evaluates the rise of 'creative industries' discourse as an emergent development, and a distinctive contribution of Australian media and communications research to the field internationally. Članek obravnava razvoj kritičnega raziskovanja komuniciranja v Avstraliji v zadnjih tridesetih letih. Ocenjuje relativni pomen kritične teorije, marksistične politične ekonomije in kulturoloških študij za razvoj take tradicije v povezavi s specifičnimi elementi avstralske politike in kulture, zlasti s slabotno institucionalno levico in populizmom kot načinom političnega delovanja. Članek vrednoti tudi sodobni vzpon diskurza "ustvarjalne industrije" in prispevek avstralskega raziskovanja medijev in komuniciranja k razvoju področja v mednarodnem okviru.

A review of the book "Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television," by Brett Christophers is presented.

This paper will consider questions around the reform of copyright law, and how they are increasingly being framed by the challenges of the digital economy. It discusses the review of copyright and the digital economy being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission, with particular reference to the costs and benefits of copyright law to consumers and creative producers. We argue that there is a pressing need to develop fair copyright rules that encourage investment in the digital economy, allow widespread dissemination of knowledge through society, and support the innovative reuse of copyright works. To better align copyright law with these goals, we recommend that Australia introduce an open ended ‘fair use’ style copyright exception, and encourage the development of a digital copyright exchange of the sort discussed in the UK by the Hargreaves and Hooper Reports.

A major debate in Australian cultural studies in the 1990s has been the “cultural policy debate.” Drawing upon theories of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault and others, there has been a move to understand cultural institutions in terms upon their relationship to the formation of citizens in modern liberal democracies. While such work can provide considerable insight into contemporary media and cultural policy processes, there are significant gaps in the Foucaultian approach, most notably its difficulties in incorporating the significance of citizenship rights to policy processes. The article explores general issues about the relationship between citizenship, participation and policy formation, and discuss their significance in light of Australian media policy debates about content regulation for commercial broadcasters, local content regulations and, more recently, censorship and the future of public broadcasting. It questions attempts to automatically equate citizenship with participat...

This paper critically analyzes the divergent perspectives on how copyright and intellectual property laws impact creativity, innovation, and the creative industries. One perspective defines the creative industries based on copyright as the means by which revenues are generated from innovation and the dissemination of new ideas. At the same time, it has been argued that copyright and intellectual property regimes fetter creativity and innovation, and that this has become even more marked in the context of digital media convergence and the networked global creative economy. These issues have resonated in debates around the creative industries, particularly since the initial DCMS mapping study in the UK in 1998 defined creative industries as combining individual creativity and exploitable forms of intellectual property. The issue of competing claims for the relationship between copyright and the creative industries has also arisen in Australia, with a report by the Australian Law Reform Commission entitled Copyright and the Digital Economy. This paper will consider the competing claims surrounding copyright and the creative industries, and the implications for policy-makers internationally.

This chapter considers the implications of convergence for media policy from three perspectives. First, it discusses what have been the traditional concerns of media policy, and the challenges it faces, from the perspectives of public interest theories, economic capture theories, and capitalist state theories. Second, it looks at what media convergence involves, and some of the dilemmas arising from convergent media policy including: (1) determining who is a media company; (2) regulatory parity between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media; (3) treatment of similar media content across different platforms; (4) distinguishing ‘big media’ from user-created content; and (5) maintaining a distinction between media regulation and censorship of personal communication. Finally, it discusses attempts to reform media policy in light of these changes, including Australian media policy reports from 2011-12 including the Convergence Review, the Finkelstein Review of News Media, and the Australian Law Reform Commission’s National Classification Scheme Review. It concludes by arguing that ‘public interest’ approaches to media policy continue to have validity, even as they grapple with the complex question of how to understand the concept of influence in a convergent media environment.

Digital technologies have transformed the way many creative works are generated, disseminated and used. They have made cultural products more accessible, challenged established business models and the copyright system, and blurred the boundary between producers and consumers. This unique resource presents an up-to-date overview of academic research on the impact of digitization in the creative sector of the economy.

The role of the state in public broadcasting remains strong but state– media relations are undergoing multi-pronged change which is yet to be sufficiently studied. While Flew and Waisbord (2015, p. 620) concur with the ‘continuing centrality of nation-states to media processes’ they also crucially observe that ‘We should move past the debate between “the global” and “the state” in media studies in order to better understand the interaction among competing forces’ (p. 13). In the African context, Zeleza (2009, p. 19) also reminds us that ‘media infrastructures, practices and policies are embedded in the prevailing material conditions of production, the ideologies of current political economies and the discourse of networks of particular periods’. These observations are crucial when investigating the role of the state in public broadcasting within the context of ‘local, national, and global forces’ that ‘shape media politics and policies’ (Flew and Waisbord, 2015, p. 633). This chapter makes three important arguments. The first concedes that states remain responsible for the overall policy and structure of their media markets, but argues that the public interest should guide how they control public broadcasting. Using the example of Zimbabwe and insights from elite continuity theory (Sparks, 2009), the role of the Zimbabwean state in public broadcasting is discussed in historical and contemporary terms.

Sakr challenges the notion that transnational media technologies have forced states in the Arab Middle East to cede ever more control to non-state players since the 1990s. Taking account of a long history of foreign political engineering in Arab countries, she probes the realities of Arab broadcasting privatization, intra-regional harmonization of government communication policies, and external financial support for media freedom and reform, to show how Arab governments were large successfully in harnessing forces implicated in media globalization in a way that entrenched authoritarian elements of the status quo. The findings validate an alternative to globalization theory that places a dual focus on the agency of national ruling elites and the international structures that underpin the power of those elites today, as in the past.