Updating Cultural Law and Policy for the Digital Age

The chapter is an enquiry of the possibly failing or changed rationales of cultural protectionism in the digital age. It seeks to identify the adjustments needed, so that cultural policy could still serve its benevolent goals and effectively contribute to sustaining a cultural environment that is diverse and vibrant.

Global Cultural Law and Policy in the Age of Ubiquitous Internet

Digital technologies and the Internet in particular have transformed the ways we create, distribute, use, reuse and consume cultural content; have impacted on the workings of the cultural industries, and more generally on the processes of making, experiencing and remembering culture in local and global spaces. Yet, few of these, often profound, transformations have found reflection in law and institutional design. Cultural policy toolkits, in particular at the international level, are still very much offline/analogue and conceive of culture as static property linked to national sovereignty and state boundaries. The article describes this state of affairs and asks the key question of whether there is a need to reform global cultural law and policy and if yes, what the essential elements of such a reform should be.