AC640 Government, Public Policy, and the Law (Political Communication) :Law and Ethics [2]
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附件:unit5.pdf
关键词:
ation
This survey is offered online.
Unit 5: Week 9 Communication and Law
Keywords:
. common carrier and carriage
. content providers
. intellectual property
. trademark, patent, copyright
. copyleft
1. Context and Perspective: Canadian Telecommunications and Broadcast
Law
Law and policy are the means by which governments intervene in our cultural
environment. Though their influence is invisible to the person watching TV or making a
cellphone call, law and policy have enormous consequences for communication as we know it. Electronic communication in Canada is defined by two major pieces of
legislation: the Telecommunications Act of 1993, and the Broadcasting Act of 1991.
Telecommunications refers to telephone, telegraph, data networks, satellite, and the
Internet; broadcasting refers to radio, television, cable, pay, and specialty TV. The
federal regulatory body that supervises adherence to both acts in Canada is the
Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, better known as the
CRTC. A link to the CRTC is offered in the Rogue’s Gallery.
The Criminal Code and the Competition Act govern things like libel, slander, and hate
law, and monopolistic practices among media companies, respectively. Together with
the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Acts named above, these four pieces of
legislation provide the basis of communication law and policy in Canada.
a. defining telecommunications and broadcast media
Telecommunications involves those institutions that serve as “common carriers,” i.e.,
institutions that serve to convey communications content but that themselves have no
responsibility or influence over what they transmit. They provide “carriage”–meaning
they carry content like e-mail or voice messages--but do not develop content. An
example is Telus, a private firm that normally has no liability with regard to what
telephone users say when they make a call. Broadcasting institutions like TV and radio
stations are “content providers.” They do have editorial oversight relative to the material
they communicate to their publics, and as such have legal liability for the content of
those messages. Given the very different historic role of common carriers and content
providers, the Telecommunications Act and the Broadcasting Act recognize this
difference in law.
The general trends affecting policy and law in both telecommunications and broadcast
are as follows: (a) technological convergence, whereby digitization allows for previously distinct
technologies and industries to merge, e.g., CanWest’s newspapers providing
digital content to the Global TV network, as both are owned by Winnipeg’s Asper
family;
(b) the trend toward a greater commercial—rather than public--framework for
communication and media networks in an era of deregulation;
(c) international trade agreements such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)
that have fostered expanded global free trade in communication products and
services.
We’ll now address legal and policy trends in telecommunication and broadcast media
separately.
b. telecommunication trends
Since the invention of the telegraph in 1837, the telecommunications industry has been
organized on a monopoly basis in North America. Western Union dominated the
telegraph industry; Bell and, later, AT&T were the chief monopolists in North American
telephony; R
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