IAMCR Law Section Report,
Taipei, July 2005

 

  1. During the 2005 IAMCR Conference the Law Section organized four substantial sessions, had one business meeting, co-sponsored one Plenary and co-hosted one working dinner.
  2. The four substantial sessions were attended by 63 participants. 16 papers were presented, ten of them by the authors themselves.
    1. Session I (five papers) discussed developments in media law in the Asian region, in particular in media law education and in antitrust law in the Internet age.
    2. Session II (two papers) dealt with Media Self-Regulation. Here two interesting cases from the US and from Hong Kong were presented.
    3. Session III (five papers) covered different aspects of Internet Regulation, including content regulation, protection of minors and Spam.
    4. the final Session IV (four papers) discussed media freedoms in the Internet Age, inter alia protection of journalistic sources, the right of reply and interception into electronic communication.
  3. The co-sponsored Plenary meeting on the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and Internet Governance was chaired by IAMCR President Robin Mansell. It presented and discussed the recently published final report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The Key Note Speech was delivered by Wolfgang Kleinwächter from the University of Aarhus, member of the WGIG. Discussants included Chen-Dong Tso from the Graduate School of Social Informatics, Yuan Ze University Taipei, and Hopeton S. Dunn, University of the West Indies, Jamaica.
  4. The working dinner was by invitation only for members of the IAMCR WSIS Task Force and researchers involved in Internet Governance activities. It was sponsored by the Taiwan National Information Center (TWNIC), the Taiwan Registry for the ccTLD .tw. It was attended by 15 people. Subject of the discussion was future research activities around Internet Governance, in particular the perspectives of the development of a “Global Academic Research Network on Internet Governance” (GARNIG), as proposed by WGIG for consideration by the forthcoming 2nd phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS II), scheduled for Tunis, November 2005.
  5. The Business Meeting decided to publish a call for papers for the IAMCR 2006 Cairo conference in fall 2006 for a minimum of two sessions: one on Media Freedoms and another one on Internet Regulation. The Law Section will also again co-sponsor a plenary Session on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

 

 

Wolfgang Kleinwächter    

Andrei Richter