Telecommunications regulation: Creating order & opportunity in UK digital terrestrial television Whitespace

This paper considers how the UK Regulator, in collaboration with stakeholders, is attempting to create a new market opportunity for advanced networked services using interleaved Digital Terrestrial Television (DTTV) Whitespace, that is, valuable spectrum released and reorganised post the digital switchover. It discusses inter alia a key issue, which is how the Regulator will balance the technical requirements needed to create a commercially viable network, against his competing obligation under the Communications Act 2003 to maintain order and avoid interference to DTTV and Programme Making & Special Event (PMSE) users. Particular consideration is given to the outcome of field trials and areas of forward risk for the Regulator.     

When a Commercial is Not a Commercial: Advertising of Violent Entertainment and the First Amendment

The September 2000 release of the Federal Trade Commission's report on the marketing of violent entertainment to children ignited the latest of many rounds of policy debates on violent entertainment and its effects on children. Parties on both sides of the debate have cited the First Amendment as limiting what the government can do to legally restrict the marketing of violent entertainment products to children. However, little detailed analysis of just how the First Amendment would apply to any such marketing restrictions has been presented. That is the subject this article takes up. First, it looks at the First Amendment standard of review applied to restrictions on commercial speech. The article also considers whether violent speech, in either entertainment programming or its advertising, may be restricted under the First Amendment. Finally, this article examines whether the advertising of violent entertainment products is entitled to the same level of First Amendment protection afforded to the products being advertised.     

Forgetting the First Amendment: How Obscurity-Based Privacy and a Right to Be Forgotten Are Incompatible with Free Speech

The privacy of personal information on the Internet has received special attention recently in both the United States and the European Union, and legislative and regulatory proposals regarding the reform privacy law abound. This article examines several prominent theories that undergird the American First Amendment and attempts to demonstrate that the concept of a privacy interest arising out of the obscurity of information, as a social normative principle, and the right to be forgotten, as a legal mechanism concerned with the European idea of dignity-based privacy, are fundamentally at odds with the right of freedom of speech.