Media and Arts Law Review
Media and Arts Law Review
Overview
The Media & Arts Law Review examines all areas of media and arts law, including communications, contempt, copyright, cultural heritage, defamation, digitisation, entertainment, free speech, intellectual property, the internet, journalism, privacy and the public interest.
The Media & Arts Law Review has a distinguished Editorial Board and publishes independently refereed articles from Australian and international authors. It also includes regular updates on media and arts law globally curated by a team of International Contributing Editors.
The Media & Arts Law Review was founded in 1996 and is issued quarterly. It is published by LexisNexis.
Editorial Board
General Editors
Associate Professor Jason Bosland
Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr Brendan Clift
Lecturer, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia
Editorial Board
Professor Tanya Aplin
Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, UK
Professor Graeme Austin
Melbourne Law School, Australia and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Professor Lionel Bently
Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, UK
Delia Browne
Board Director, Creative Commons
Ursula Cheer
Professor, School of Law, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Professor Graeme Dinwoodie
Global Professor, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Colin Golvan AM QC
Barrister
Emeritus Professor Reg Graycar
Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, Australia
Professor Michael Handler
Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia
Professor Andrew Kenyon
Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Professor David Lindsay
Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney
Professor Fiona Macmillan
Department of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Professor Brian C Murchison
School of Law, Washington and Lee University, USA
Professor Megan Richardson
Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Emeritus Professor Sam Ricketson
Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Professor David Rolph
Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney
Professor Melissa de Zwart
The University of Adelaide, Australia
Emeritus Professor Michael Chesterman
Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia
International Contributing Editors
The Review has a number of International Contributing Editors who provide regular updates about developments in their region. Updates offer a snapshot of matters such as case law, legislation, law reform, international conventions, and changes in industry self-regulation.
Contributors Include:
Samtani Anil - Singapore Media Law
Associate Professor, Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Anne Cheung - Hong Kong Media Law
Professor, Department of Law, Hong Kong University
Jonathan Griffiths - UK and European Media Law
Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London
Lyrissa Lidsky
Dean and Judge CA Leedy Professor of Law, School of Law, University of Missouri
Roger D McConchie - Canadian Media Law
McConchie Law, Vancouver, Canada
Andrew Scott - UK and European Media Law
Associate Professor, Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science
David Tan - Singapore IP
Professor, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Kyu Ho Youm - Korean Media Law
Professor, Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon
Information for Authors
Submissions
To contribute to the Media & Arts Law Review please visit the Review’s LexisNexis website.
Style
Authors are expected to follow the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC).
General
The Media & Arts Law Review publishes articles (generally between 4,000 and 15,000 words) and shorter case notes, update reports, book reviews and conference reports.
Articles submitted to the Media & Arts Law Review undergo editorial review and double-blind review by two anonymous professional peers of the author. The identity of the author should not appear in the body of a submitted article, but the relevant details should be attached to the article.
Authors should provide an abstract of approximately 100 words with a submitted article.
All manuscripts submitted to the Media & Arts Law Review should be original and not under consideration for another publication.
Authors license publication in the Media & Arts Law Review in print and electronic form.
Past Volumes
Latest Volume
2023 Volume 25 Issue 4
Articles
Law’s imperfect governance: Is the metaverse the solution?
Roger Brownsword
This article sketches three ways in which lawyers might engage with the metaverse. For lawyers who reason in a traditionally doctrinal and coherentist Law 1.0 way, the challenge will be to apply a repertoire of legal rules and principles — rules and principles that have been developed for the governance of transactions and interactions in the real world — to whatever ‘harms’ might be alleged to be caused by the development and use of the metaverse. For lawyers reasoning in a Law 2.0 way, the challenge will be to ensure that the legal rules and principles that are in place are ‘fit for purpose’ relative to the beneficial uses of the metaverse as well as to managing whatever risks it might present. For those who think in the manner of Law 3.0, while the challenge will be similar to that set by Law 2.0, the construction of a regulatory environment that is fit for purpose relative to the metaverse will aim to make use of the optimal mix of rules and technical tools. Significantly, Law 3.0’s mode of reasoning might prompt the thought that the metaverse itself might be a tool to be used with a view to improving on the imperfect performance of law’s governance.
Legal implications of self-presence in the metaverse
Jyh-An Lee, Liang Yang and Pan Hui
The relationship between people and their avatars in computer-generated environments remains a puzzling matter, especially when harm to an avatar negatively affects the person possessing the avatar. Drawing on the theories of digital equivalence, we highlight the unprecedented development of the metaverse and illustrate the evolution of self-presence in that digital sphere. We then use Lawrence Lessig’s New Chicago School model to analyse how self-presence in the metaverse is regulated by technology, social norms, market forces and the law. While the independent and joint effects of these regulatory factors are constantly evolving, they all play distinct and important roles in shaping self-presence in the metaverse.
Trademarks in the metaverse: Everything, everywhere all at once
David Tan
While the metaverse as an immersive virtual environment is a much-debated concept with myriad definitions, what is generally agreed is that the line between the social realities about how individuals live on a daily basis and the constructed online worlds in which people choose to invest their time, money, emotion and creativity will blur as the metaverse becomes more prominent and pervasive in the future. This article discusses trademark use in the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and analyses how the freedom of expression can be accommodated in trademark doctrine as the law evolves to address the new challenges that technological advancement is presenting. It concludes that the metaverse may be regarded as the emerging digital carnivalesque, where individuals communicate through the use of avatars, images and videos each chosen with its semiotic freight and particular connotations understood within that community. It is in this new frenetic and dynamic digital milieu that trademark law must find its new space.