Digital Media Law

In a world where anyone can become a media producer, everyone should know something about media law – both to protect their own rights and to avoid violating the rights of others. Digital Media Law is the first media law text to respond to digitalization and globalization—the two most significant agents of change in the 21st century. 

Designed to appeal to a broader audience of communication and digital media students, as well as journalism and law students, Digital Media Law covers salient issues from freedom of expression to commercial speech and information access. An accompanying website provides updates on new rulings, access to slip opinions, and other supplementary material, and a section on legal research teaches students to find the law on their own. For students of both media and law, this book is a timely introduction to an important new field. 

Ashley Packard is associate professor of communication and digital media at University of Houston – Clear Lake, where she has chaired the communication program for the last five years. Beginning in the fall of 2007, she will give that up to chair the university’s new graduate program in Digital Media Studies, which is the first of its kind in Texas. She teaches Media Law, Communication Ethics, and Mass Media and Society in the undergraduate Communication Program, and will teach a graduate seminar in Digital Media Law and Ethics in the Digital Media Studies program. She has recently completed an entry on Conflict of Laws for Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Communication, and a chapter on Internet Law in the book Newspaper Competition in the Millennium, published in 2006. She publishes widely in journals such as the Journal of International Media and Entertainment, Communication Law and Policy, Journalism & Communication Monographs, Law/Technology, Legal Studies Forum, Communications and the Law and the Journal of Intellectual Property Law. This is her first book.