Indecent Proposals: A Legal Analysis of ‘Indecency’ Applied to Broadcasting and the Internet

The purpose of the dissertation was to analyze indecency policy and identify valid arguments and approaches from which one can find a viable model or approach of content regulation for both broadcast media and the Internet. Broadcast media and the Internet are both under scrutiny by the federal government for increased content regulation; therefore, both media are facing threatened First Amendments rights. This dissertation explored whether the public interest could be best served through the marketplace approach to content regulation of indecent speech on broadcast radio and television and the Internet. The dissertation explored, compared, and contrasted indecency regulation on broadcast radio and television with indecency regulation on the Internet. It attempted to find trends, patterns, similarities, and differences in the mandated and suggested policies centering on regulating indecency on commercial broadcast radio and television and the Internet. The study also looked at the direction the legislative and judicial branches are going concerning policies on regulating indecent content on the Internet. The dissertation found that the marketplace approach to indecency regulation has so far prevailed on the Internet, with the exception of CIPA. With emerging technologies such as Internet filters and V-Chips, further government regulation of indecent content on the Internet or on broadcast television and radio would be not be useful. A receiver-based content control approach proposed in the dissertation suggested that the marketplace approach to content regulation would better serve the public interest because the public’s interest would be defined by the public itself

Audio communication in the face of the renaissance of digital audio

In recent years, digital audio has undergone an explosion. The transformation of radio and its expansion to new channels and consumer devices, added to the rise of podcasts and streaming music platforms, have led to the transformation of the audio ecosystem. This transition from the audio medium to audio media has involved an integral change in content, as well as in its production and reception processes. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to approach the present digital audio scene from the standpoint of its content, formats, and broadcasting models as well as of the new professional profiles, business models, and consumer–relationship practices, providing a snapshot that is completed with a prospective reflection on the challenges facing radio in this new ecosystem

The legal issues of webcasting

This paper will deal with the legal aspects and issues of webcasting. In the first part, I will examine webcasting itself and will differentiate it from other similar forms of data transfer etc. Next, I will describe the technology behind webcasting, which is relevant to copyright issues. The central part of this paper will outline the legal issues surrounding webcasting and discuss possible solutions. I will also look at different countries and their legislation around broadcasting system to analyze whether it is sufficient to deal with webcasting

Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization; Schemes, Use Cases and Standardization

Traditionally, the media consumption model has been a passive and isolated activity. However, the advent of media streaming technologies, interactive social applications, and synchronous communications, as well as the convergence between these three developments, point to an evolution towards dynamic shared media experiences. In this new model, geographically distributed groups of consumers, independently of their location and the nature of their end-devices, can be immersed in a common virtual networked environment in which they can share multimedia services, interact and collaborate in real-time within the context of simultaneous media content consumption. In most of these multimedia services and applications, apart from the well-known intra and inter-stream synchronization techniques that are important inside the consumers playout devices, also the synchronization of the playout processes between several distributed receivers, known as multipoint, group or Inter-destination multimedia synchronization (IDMS), becomes essential. Due to the increasing popularity of social networking, this type of multimedia synchronization has gained in popularity in recent years. Although Social TV is perhaps the most prominent use case in which IDMS is useful, in this paper we present up to 19 use cases for IDMS, each one having its own synchronization requirements. Different approaches used in the (recent) past by researchers to achieve IDMS are described and compared. As further proof of the significance of IDMS nowadays, relevant organizations (such as ETSI TISPAN and IETF AVTCORE Group) efforts on IDMS standardization (in which authors have been and are participating actively), defining architectures and protocols, are summarized.This work has been financed, partially, by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), under its R&D Support Program in PAID-05-11-002-331 Project and in PAID-01-10, and by TNO, under its Future Internet Use Research & Innovation Program. The authors also want to thank Kevin Gross for providing some of the use cases included in Sect. 1.2.Montagud, M.; Boronat Segui, F.; Stokking, H.; Van Brandenburg, R. (2012). Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization; Schemes, Use Cases and Standardization. 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The Right to Reject: The First Amendment in a Media-Drenched Society

This Article addresses the First Amendment status of the one participant in the communications process who is the most vulnerable and least protected in today\u27s media-saturated world - the unwilling recipient of offensive media entertainment speech. The Article argues that for the communicative process to be truly free and open, listeners should have as much right to be free from unwanted non-political speech as speakers do of not being thrown in jail for uttering unpopular ideas. The Article examines a side of communicative freedom (e.g., the right of listeners to reject) that for centuries was taken for granted and that in recent decades has been greatly eroded. Current First Amendment jurisprudence assumes that people can simply avert their eyes whenever confronted with violent or pornographic speech. But in reality, given the pervasiveness of the media, the ability to avoid repulsive or offensive speech has been greatly diminished. Despite the abundance of harmful media speech, the courts have placed all burden of avoiding it on the listener and the viewer, yet without providing any effective tools for doing so. Thus, an individual\u27s right to reject unwanted non-political speech may need a boost if it is to be anything more than a convenient fiction. This Article articulates a new model of the Free Speech Clause that takes into account the realities of the media-saturated society that America has become. This model, while giving explicit recognition to the high status of political speech, places non-political media entertainment on a lower constitutional level. The model also addresses what has become a major shortcoming of the current marketplace theory of the First Amendment - the almost complete disregard of the rights and freedoms of besieged listeners and viewers in a culture of pervasive media