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As some telecommunication companies slowly turn themselves into producers and distributors of media content, new issues arise for competition regulators. Public officials have hinted at several ways of dealing with this issue. On the one hand, market regulators are keen on maintaining a clear differentiation between these two sectors. On the other hand, some government officials seem willing to accept greater interconnections between them. For example, France is considering merging two agencies that regulate the media (TV and radio) sector and the telecom sector as well as extending audiovisual regulation… Lire la suite »Regulation : The Internet is not TV

At the beginning of this year, the head of the European Commission’s Internal Market and Services Directorate General Charlie McCreevy announced his plan to extend copyright terms for performers and phonogram producers from 50 years today to 95 years (1). The Commission advances the argument that many works from ageing musicians dating back to the 1950’s are about to fall into the public domain. As the Commission proposal explains: Performers usually transfer their most economically significant exclusive copyrights to record companies via contract. In most cases, individual performers have little… Lire la suite »Copyright Gone Wrong

In On Liberty (1859), philosopher John Stuart Mill reflects on the potential coercion that could result from democracy and more especially from what Alexi De Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority”. In this work, Mill formulates a very convincing plea in favor of free speech. According to him, only by discussion can we test the validity of people’s beliefs and only by dialectic can we successfully undermine false and dangerous ones. And if a given opinion contains some truth, by preventing someone from expressing it we deny society the… Lire la suite »The Freedom to Digitalize Revolutionary Powers