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This current and comprehensive, market-leading textbook addresses the most relevant and important aspects of mass media law in the United States, stretching from the history and adoption of the First Amendment to the most recent judicial opinions, statutory enactments, and regulatory controversies affecting speech across the print, broadcast, cable and Internet media. From the laws of libel and privacy to the regulation of advertising and telecommunications, Mass Media Law examines timely issues that are shaping the United States' legal system and the future of media content.

Two entertainment attorneys and Hollywood insiders explain all the ins and outs of negotiating in the movie industry, including back ends, gross and adjusted gross profits, deferments, box office bonuses, copyrights, and much more.



This easy-to-follow reference–written clearly, without confusing legal jargon–is packed with expert insights on distribution, licensing, and merchandising. The book's invaluable resource section includes definitions of lingo for acquisition agreements and employment deals, twelve ready-to-use sample contracts, and a directory of entertainment attorneys in both New York and Los Angeles. With the negotiating tips in this guide, agents, writers, directors, actors, financiers, and filmmakers will save thousands of dollars in attorney fees.

A riveting, in-depth account of one of New York City’s most notorious crimes.

On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull so badly smashed that nearly 80 percent of her blood has spilled onto the ground. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers confess to her rape and beating. In a city where urban crime is at a high and violence is frequent, the ensuing media frenzy and hysterical public reaction is extraordinary. The young men are tried as adults and convicted of rape, despite the fact that the teens quickly recant their inconsistent and inaccurate confessions and that no DNA tests or eyewitness accounts tie any of them to the victim. They serve their complete sentences before another man, serial rapist Matias Reyes, confesses to the crime and is connected to it by DNA testing.

Intertwining the stories of these five young men, the police officers, the district attorneys, the victim, and Matias Reyes, Sarah Burns unravels the forces that made both the crime and its prosecution possible. Most dramatically, she gives us a portrait of a city already beset by violence and deepening rifts between races and classes, whose law enforcement, government, social institutions, and media were undermining the very rights of the individuals they were designed to safeguard and protect.

This current and comprehensive market-leading textbook addresses the most relevant and important aspects of mass media law in the United States, stretching from the history and adoption of the First Amendment to the most recent judicial opinions, statutory enactments and regulatory controversies affecting speech across the print, broadcast, cable and Internet media. From the laws of libel and privacy to the regulation of advertising and telecommunications, Mass Media Law 2009/2010 examines timely issues that are shaping the United States’ legal system and the future of media content. The new edition has been streamlined to include new opinions and updated coverage of important current media law concerns, including the right of reporters to protect their sources, censorship problems related to terrorism, file sharing, and the law of privacy.

From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

This edition provides students with the intellectual tools they will need to resolve legal issues arising from the ongoing dramatic reshaping of the media. It includes new material on matters such as anonymity and foreign law which have become more urgent because of the transformation of media industries. It covers the established precedents whose fundamental principles will guide the law's response to new threats of censorship, examines barriers to newsgathering, and explores impediments to media adaptability. This edition refines and streamlines the materials of previous editions to give students an uncluttered view of the current state of media law. Cumulatively, the co-authors have taught media law for nearly 100 years, and this edition reflects the pedagogical insights gleaned from that experience.

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field. Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labour and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labour, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.

Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changeso especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimediaonecessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin. Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of workingohow they research, write, and reviewowhile administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university. Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores all of these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain vibrant and relevant in the digital future.