The first bunch of papers from last spring’s British & Irish Law, Education & Technology Association (BILETA) conference in Vienna have just appeared in the European Journal of Law and Technology. The EJLT, for those that haven’t come across it yet, is the successor to the long-running Warwick-based Journal of Information, Law & Technology (JILT). The current issue, Volume 1 No. 2, contains revised versions of papers first circulated at the conference.
Of particular interest to me is the paper by Nick Scharf, a doctoral student at the UEA Law School, supervised by Prof. Chris Wadlow with assistance from myself. His paper on Digital Rights Management and Fair Use considers recent developments in relation to DRM in the context of the various legal and technical developments that have brought us to the current position, and he argues that modern DRM is network- rather than just content-based.
I also enjoyed the papers by Marsden (which I saw at the conference) and Jones (which I didn’t). Jones (Intellectual Property Reform for the Internet Generation) looks at current debates in copyright reform and pays particular attention to the actions of and future for the record labels and the recording industry. Marsden (European Law and Regulation of Mobile Net Neutrality) adds to his work on net neutrality more generally by considering the position of mobile (or in US terms ‘wireless’) ISPs regarding the great neutrality debate. Despite the title and the obvious appeal of the neutrality question, it’s also a very interesting take on the general business model and regulatory climate for mobile networks per se.
Self-promotion alert: a paper based on my own BILETA presentation (on computer games) appears shortly in the Entertainment Law Review – I’ve approved the proofs and it’s due out in volume 21(8), between now and the end of the year.
