New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies in comparative communication law. Through these cases, Eko describes, explains and illustrates how a number of nation-states, transnational, and international organizations employ culture-specific "distillations" of universal principles to resolve tensions between freedom of expression and other societal interests in real space and cyberspace. This study provides essential scholarship on comparative communication law and policy.

Chronicles social media over two millennia, from papyrus letters that Cicero used to exchange news across the Empire to today, reminding us how modern behavior echoes that of prior centuries and encouraging debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.

New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies which illustrate how different communication law regimes conceptualize and apply universal ideals of human rights and freedom of expression to media controversies in real space and cyberspace. Eko’s investigation includes such controversial communication policy topics as North African regimes’ failed use of telecommunications to suppress the social change of the Arab Spring, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark and France, French and American policy of development and diffusion of the Minitel and the Internet, American and Russian regulation of internet surveillance, the problem of managing pedopornography in cyberspace and real space, and other current communication policy cases. This study will aid readers not only to understand different national and cultural perspectives of thorny communication issues, but also show that though freedom of expression is a pluralistic concept, the actions of all political regimes at the national, transnational, and international levels must be held up to the universal standards of freedom of expression set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New Media, Old Regimes provides essential scholarship on comparative communication law and policy in a world of new media.

In From Old Regime to Industrial State, Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis question established thinking about Germany’s industrialization. While some hold that Germany experienced a sudden breakthrough to industrialization, the authors instead consider a long view, incorporating market demand, agricultural advances, and regional variations in industrial innovativeness, customs, and governance. They begin their assessment earlier than previous studies to show how the 18th-century emergence of international trade and the accumulation of capital by merchants fed commercial expansion and innovation. This book provides the history behind the modern German economic juggernaut.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this analysis of media law in Kuwait surveys the massively altered and enlarged legal landscape traditionally encompassed in laws pertaining to freedom of expression and regulation of communications. Everywhere, a shift from mass media to mass self-communication has put enormous pressure on traditional law models. An introduction describing the main actors and salient aspects of media markets is followed by in-depth analyses of print media, radio and television broadcasting, the Internet, commercial communications, political advertising, concentration in media markets, and media regulation. Among the topics that arise for discussion are privacy, cultural policy, protection of minors, competition policy, access to digital gateways, protection of journalists’ sources, standardization and interoperability, and liability of intermediaries. Relevant case law is considered throughout, as are various ethical codes. A clear, comprehensive overview of media legislation, case law, and doctrine, presented from the practitioner’s point of view, this book is a valuable time-saving resource for all concerned with media and communication freedom. Lawyers representing parties with interests in Kuwait will welcome this very useful guide, and academics and researchers will appreciate its value in the study of comparative media law.

This volume explores the sameness and difference between the United States and France in the matters of freedom of expression on the Internet. The United States and France are liberal democracies that are part of the Western family of nations. However, despite their many similarities, they have a number of cultural and ideological differences. The United States is generally France’s ally in time of war and its cultural nemesis in time of peace. One of the reasons for this unusual relationship is that the United States and France are self-described “exceptional” countries. The United States and France are therefore two Western countries separated by different exceptionalist logics. Lyombe Eko uses this concept of exceptionalism as a theoretical framework for the analysis of American and French resolution of problems of human rights and freedom of expression in the traditional media and on the Internet. This book therefore analyzes how each county applies rules and regulations designed to manage a number of issues of media communication in real space, to the realities and specificities of cyberspace, within the framework of their respective exceptionalist logics. The fundamental question addressed concerns what happens when rules and regulations designed to regulate the media in clearly defined, national and regional geographic spaces, are suddenly confronted with the new realities and multi-communication platforms of the interconnected virtual sphere of cyberspace.

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.