Conference “International and Comparative Media
and Telecommunications Law on Content Regulation”

Conference “International and Comparative Media and Telecommunications Law on Content Regulation” was held on 19 June 1999 in Moscow. Besides the Moscow Media Law and Policy Center the following organizations contributed to the conference: Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, and Oxford University’s Program for Comparative Media Law and Policy.

Devoted to practical aspects of content regulation in the media and telecommunications, the conference examined the challenges to the traditional approaches to content regulation at the dawn of the millenium. The acts and bills related to regulation of hate speech, pornography, indecency in broadcasting and telecommunications were raised and discussed. Parental control, taste and decency issues, self-regulation in telecommunications and Internet, copyright protection in the new media were debated.

The conference was addressed by a number of Russian specialists, sharing their views and developments in the field of legal regulation of the content. Among them were Yassen N. Zassoursky, Dean and Professor, Yelena Vartanova, Associate Professor, both of the School of Journalism, Moscow State University, Stanislav Sheverdyaev, Fyodor Kravchenko, Pavel Sourkov, all of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Center, Viktor B.Naumov, Fellow of the St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei V.Bondarenko, Chair, National Agency on Copyright and Related Rights (Rostov-on-Don) and others.

The conference was attended by experts from the USA, Professor Herbert Terry, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, and Professor Monroe Price, and five experts from Britain: Colin Shaw, Fellow of PCMLP and Former Director of the Broadcasting Standards Council; Rachel Craufurd-Smith, Fellow of Corpus-Christi (Oxford), Robert Pinker, Privacy Commissioner of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC - UK), Stuart Lockyiar, Partner Stephens Innocent, London, and David Goldberg, Glasgow University.

Attending the conference were representatives of the mass media, experts in telecommunications, governmental officials, scholars, lawyers, teachers, experts who came from other CIS countries. Altogether 61 participants were registered.