Media policy for ethnic and national minorities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia

This chapter describes legal, institutional and professional frameworks for media policy concerning national and ethnic minorities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It considers four models of minority media policy – the autonomous; anti-discrimination; minority protection and assimilation models – in an attempt to examine how minority access to the media can be facilitated through regulation. In particular, the author argues for greater emphasis to be placed on minority protection and anti-discrimination measures

One Step Forward, One Step Back: An Assessment of Freedom of Expression in Ukraine during its OSCE Chairmanship

2013 is the first year Ukraine has held the Chairmanship in Office (CIO) of the OSCE since it became a participating state in the organization in 1992. The Chairman in Office, Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Leonid Kozhara, outlined the country's priorities for its CIO in November 2012, among which were the freedom of speech, resolving the frozen conflicts, and combating human trafficking, and acknowledged that Ukraine's own record would be under the microscope during its CIO.Little progress has been made on many of those questions as acknowledged by Foreign Minister Kozhara in a recent editorial and in a bi-annual report issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Ukrainian OSCE chairmanship. According to their assessments, special attention has been paid to resolving the frozen conflicts, but few results in strengthening the freedom of speech have been realized except for the "arrangement of necessary conditions for renewal of mandate of Representative on Freedom of the Media."Ukraine's progress in meeting its obligations to respect the freedom of expression, including to facilitate the dissemination of information and working conditions for journalists, has been mostly unsatisfactory in recent years lagging behind progress made in Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia while doing better than Azerbaijan and Belarus. In spite of the generally high quality of legislation, the reality of implementation is less impressive. Citizens may freely express their views, and collect and disseminate information, but access to free and pluralistic media and to public information held by the authorities is inadequate. Journalists' working conditions are not secure enough to work safely and remedies for violations of journalists' rights or attacks on journalists are ineffective.The media, and especially television, is rife with hidden paid content, making it difficult for viewers to discern what news is real and what is not. Television stations are constantly juggling political and economic pressure. Adherence to journalistic standards is unsatisfactory as ethics boards are ineffective.2013 has thus far included some meaningful efforts to improve Ukrainian media legislation following a 2-year delay in reform; the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's Parliament) enacted a law on ownership transparency of media and passed the laws on public service broadcasting and privatization of government-owned press in the first reading. Neither law has proceeded to the second reading though, raising concerns about their ultimate fate.Access to the media for the ruling party and its allies is significantly easier, including during the electoral period, due to legislative privileges for officials and governmental bodies and their influence on government-owned media outlets. Nationwide TV channels often do not cover the opposition because of special relations between their oligarch owners and the ruling political forces. A lack of quality analytical reports on television, the Internet, and in the print press, as well as the proliferation of tabloid-style content, also limit access to good quality information and access to the media by the opposition.Much of the local media is financially dependent on the government and thus on the ruling political forces. Ownership of TV channels is not transparent and the new law on media ownership leaves loopholes, allowing opaque ownership structures to persist across the sector. The National Council on TV and Radio Broadcasting is not an independent regulatory body. Moreover, nationwide TV channels show loyalty to the government as important political events and themes, especially those relating to the political opposition, are covered inadequately or not at all.There have been improvements in the protection of journalists' sources. Since implementation of the new Code on Criminal Proceedings, there have been no reports of police pressuring journalists to disclose their sources. Despite this progress, journalists who work for Internet media are still vulnerable.There has been little recent progress in meeting the obligation to guarantee transparency in public affairs. Progress in the sector of access to public information, made in 2011, has stalled. The preliminary passage in 2012 of a draft law that would bring Ukrainian laws in line with model laws on access to information is a step in the right direction, but the second reading has been inexplicably put off several times and the date of its adoption is unclear

Investing in Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media

Outlines the case for assessing the impact of public interest media projects, impact evaluation needs, and five new assessment tools, including a unified social media dashboard, model formats and processes to communicate outcomes, and common survey tools

Jurisprudence under the perspective of the new media and its effect on the communication of law

Despite the law knowledge presumption, Jurisprudence has not always considered the effects introduced by the communication of law in the transition from the print to the electric revolution, using here concepts and ideas of McLuhan´s theory. The use of Internet by Brazilian Courts (on line transmission of trials, the digital process, transformation of courts in source of news on what concerns their decisions) is an interesting example of how the new medium interferes in the substance of the message of law, since the movement of the messages must be considered to understand the epistemological domain of law. New elements are introduced by the new media and interact with the old meanings, concepts and processes of law and of the old media and can themselves bring new conflicts that are relevant to the comprehension of the complete and real dynamics of Law

Leslislating in the Face of New Technology: Copyright Laws for the Digital Age

This Note discusses the agendas and proposals of different countries with respect to copyright regulation in the digital age. Part I discusses the present state of copyright law in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Community. Part I also examines laws that have developed in response to new technology. Part II considers the varying commentaries and proposals addressing the promulgation of copyright law for digital technology. Part III argues that the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Community should take their existing copyright concepts and expand them to fit with digital technology. In addition, Part III maintains that lawmakers should consider copyright infringement liability standards which are based on an OSP\u27s knowledge of and ability to control infringing works appearing on online services. Finally, this Note concludes that promulgation of copyright laws relating to the Internet is crucial to the growth of online services and a necessary prerequisite to a global information infrastructure

What's Going on in Community Media

What's Going On in Community Media shines a spotlight on media practices that increase citizen participation in media production, governance, and policy. The report summarizes the findings of a nationwide scan of effective and emerging community media practices conducted by the Benton Foundation in collaboration with the Community Media and Technology Program of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The scan includes an analysis of trends and emerging practices; comparative research; an online survey of community media practitioners; one-on-one interviews with practitioners, funders and policy makers; and the information gleaned from a series of roundtable discussions with community media practitioners in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Portland, Oregon

H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-28 on Tworek. News from Germany: the competition to control world communications, 1900-1945

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Statistical privacy-preserving message dissemination for peer-to-peer networks

Concerns for the privacy of communication is widely discussed in research and overall society. For the public financial infrastructure of blockchains, this discussion encompasses the privacy of transaction data and its broadcasting throughout the network. To tackle this problem, we transform a discrete-time protocol for contact networks over infinite trees into a computer network protocol for peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks are modeled as organically growing graphs. We show that the distribution of shortest paths in such a network can be modeled using a normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(\mu,\sigma^2).$ We determine statistical estimators for $\mu,\sigma$ via multivariate models. The model behaves logarithmic over the number of nodes n and proportional to an inverse exponential over the number of added edges k. These results facilitate the computation of optimal forwarding probabilities during the dissemination phase for optimal privacy in a limited information environment.Comment: 6 figures, 19 pages, single colum