Copyright law was once an esoteric backwater, the special province of professional authors, publishers, and media companies. This is no longer the case. In the age of social media and cloud storage, we have become a copying and sharing culture. Much of our everyday communication, work, and entertainment now directly involves copyright law. Copyright law and policy are ferociously contested. Record labels, movie studios, book publishers, newspapers, and many authors rage that those who share music, video, text, and images over the Internet are "stealing" their property. By contrast, copyright industry critics celebrate digital technology's potential to make the universe of movies, music, books, and art accessible anytime and anywhere - and to empower individuals the world over to express themselves by sharing and remixing those works. These critics argue that excessive copyright enforcement threatens that promise and stifles creativity. In Copyright: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Neil Netanel explains the concepts needed to understand the heated debates about copyright law and policy. He identifies the combatants, unpacks their arguments, and illuminates what is at stake in the debates over copyright's present and future.

The Law of Public Communication provides an overview of media law that includes the most current legal developments today. It explains the laws affecting the daily work of writers, broadcasters, advertisers, cable operators, Internet service providers, public relations practitioners, photographers, bloggers, and other public communicators. Authors Kent R. Middleton, William E. Lee, and Daxton R. Stewart take students through the basic legal principles and methods of analysis that allow students to study and keep abreast of the rapidly changing field of public communication. By providing statutes and cases in a cohesive manner that is understandable, even to students studying law for the first time, the authors ensure that students will acquire a firm grasp of the legal issues affecting the media. This 2017 Update brings the Ninth Edition up to date with the most recent cases and examples affecting media professionals and public communicators.

A collection of research reports on policy issues involving telecommunications, particularly the Internet. Until the 1980s, it was presumed that technical change in most communications services could easily be monitored from centralized state and federal agencies. This presumption was long outdated prior to the commercialization of the Internet. With the Internet, the long-forecast convergence of voice, video, and text bits became a reality. Legislation, capped by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, created new quasi-standards such as "fair" and "reasonable" for the FCC and courts to apply, leading to nonstop litigation and occasional gridlock. This book addresses some of the many telecommunications areas on which public policy makers, corporate strategists, and social activists must reach agreement. Topics include the regulation of access, Internet architecture in a commercial era, communications infrastructure development, the Digital Divide, and information policy issues such as intellectual property and the retransmission of TV programming via the Internet.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this practical analysis of sports law in the United States deals with the regulation of sports activity by both public authorities and private sports organizations. The growing internationalization of sports inevitably increases the weight of global regulation, yet each country maintains its own distinct regime of sports law and its own national and local sports organizations. Sports law at a national or organizational level thus gains a growing relevance in comparative law. The book describes and discusses both state-created rules and autonomous self-regulation regarding the variety of economic, social, commercial, cultural, and political aspects of sports activities. Self- regulation manifests itself in the form of by-laws, and encompasses organizational provisions, disciplinary rules, and rules of play. However, the trend towards more professionalism in sports and the growing economic, social and cultural relevance of sports have prompted an increasing reliance on legal rules adopted by public authorities. This form of regulation appears in a variety of legal areas, including criminal law, labour law, commercial law, tax law, competition law, and tort law, and may vary following a particular type or sector of sport. It is in this dual and overlapping context that such much-publicized aspects as doping, sponsoring and media, and responsibility for injuries are legally measured. This monograph fills a gap in the legal literature by giving academics, practitioners, sports organizations, and policy makers access to sports law at this specific level. Lawyers representing parties with interests in the United States will welcome this very useful guide, and academics and researchers will appreciate its value in the study of comparative sports law.