Chapter 16 Media Law Chapter Insights Copyright law protects intellectual property with a lot of twists wrought by emerging technology The heart of U S mass media law is the First Amendment s guarantee of free expression The First Amendment has come to be applied more broadly over the years Anyone falsely slandered by the mass media may sue for libel The courts have addressed indecency as an issue by defining obscenity and pornography differently Shaking Up Hollywood Jon Lech Johansen played DVDs from US Norwegian prices were jacked up sources and played them on his computer using coding that he invented Why shouldn t others share my enjoyment he posted his coding onto the internet after that The Motion Picture Association of America pushed Norwegian authorities to act police raided the Johansen home confiscated his computer put him through 7 hours of interrogation confident he had done nothing wrong Jon even gave police the password to his computer Johansen found himself at the vortex of a continuing struggle between the rights of mega media conglomerates that own creative material and the rights of individuals to do what they want with products they buy in this case copying DVDs and also music to play on any number of their own devices Hollywood executives said Johansen had unleashed software that facilitated movie piracy and could leave the movie industry in ruins Johansen responded that he had committed no wrongdoing let alone piracy and that he had a fundamental human right of free expression to share his coding however he wanted fancied himself a consumer advocate and should allow people to use their DVD purchases as they wanted on computers at home on laptops on the road on handheld devices anywhere The court agreed In fact when the prosecution appealed the court agreed again In the May Day parade in Oslo backer s carried a banned Free DVD Jon meanwhile more than 1 million copies of his anti DVD encryption software had been downloaded from Johansen s site Norway later revised its laws to forbid software that could be used to undermine copyright protections But the issue lives on as you will discover This includes the most pressing media law dilemma in the early 21st century the protection of intellectual property Intellectual Property Products produced by mass media companies go by the legal name of intellectual property Copyright law protects ownership rights to intellectual property Other rights including consumer rights and free expression rights have arisen to challenge the long held supremacy of copyright Mass media companies are worried Copyright Copyright Protects the ownership rights of creative works including books articles and lyrics Copyright has been around since the beginning of the Republic When Congress first convened in 1790 the second law was for copyright with creative work classified as property creative people have a legal right to derive income from their works by charging for their use e g an author can charge a book publisher a fee for publishing the book The goal was to guarantee a financial incentive for creative people to keep creating Inventions which are covered by patents are a separate area of intellectual property Intellectual Property creative works Permissions Copyright law allows creators to control their creation sell it lease it give it away or just sit on it Copyright law is the vehicle through which creative people can earn a livelihood Creators of intellectual property grant permissions for the use of their work usually for a fee Permissions Grant of rights for a second party to use copyright protected work e g freelance photographers charge magazines that want to use their photographs Assignments Although there are notable lone rangers the resources of major media companies make it attractive for the creators of intellectual property to sell or assign their rights to a media company In exchange for the assignment of their rights the originating creator usually receives a flat fee or a percentage of the eventual revenue Assignment Transfer of ownership interest in a piece of intellectual property Also media companies hire creative people whose work as a part of their employment belongs automatically to the company Media companies vigilantly guard the studio s intellectual property against theft or piracy as they call it Piracy Theft of copyright protected material Hollywood studios each have dozens of attorneys who monitor for infringements of their copyrights Infringement A violation of copyright Media companies go to court against anyone who expropriates their property without permission and without paying a fee Consumer Rights Time and time again media companies wedded to the past have failed to think outside the box and exploit new technologies not since the glory days of RCA Radio Corporation of America which prided itself on research and development under David Sarno have the established media companies been on the technological cutting edge Media companies find their existence on the verge of being upended by innovators who are seeing new basic infrastructures and saying to hell with old business models Consider the recorded music industry in the Napster and Grokster cases and the book industry in the Google case Grokster Napster was the first to hit the dust in a 2001 federal court case Then came the case against Grokster another peer to peer service Grokster argued that its software was neutral as to the rights and wrongs of copyright law Grokster Involved in U S Supreme Court case that said promoting the illegal copying of intellectual property is an infringement on copyright Yes said Grokster there could be misuses but the recording industry s legal target should be the misusers not Grokster In 2005 the Supreme Court noted that Grokster had explicitly promoted the copyright infringement potential of its software it was right there in the company s own advertising the ads were selfincriminating the Court said Grokser was out of business The lesson is that infringement enabling devises are all right as long as infringement isn t encouraged The end result after the legal battles was that the music industry came out of its decades old bu ered ways which had been shielded by copyright law and embraced the new technology Even by the time of the Grokster decision the German owned global media giant Bertelsmann had bought the remnants of Napster to find ways to market its music online Also Apple s online music store iTunes