The interaction between national and international laws, and the realities of contemporary global trade in media content in a predominantly digital environment, raise challenges, uncertainties and opportunities for media companies. When it comes to licensing, protecting and enforcing copyright and other intellectual property rights, media companies and their advisers need to understand and make use of not only national but international legal rules.

The chapters in this book offer a variety of perspectives on the relevance of international copyright and other intellectual property regimes to media businesses. What do these international rules mean in reality, how are they taken into account in national systems, what challenges do they pose, what sort of future development are we likely to see, and what are the implications of all this for media businesses seeking to benefit from their content production in the international arena?

The book is comprised of papers and edited transcripts of talks delivered at a symposium of the same name which took place in Stockholm, Sweden in October 2007 and which gathered together speakers from across Europe representing legal practice, academia, policy-making and media content production and distribution.

This paper examines the limited, but growing, body of case law in various jurisdictions which has examined the question of copyright protection for TV formats. Two broad approaches can be identified on the part of the courts involved: (1) to try to draw analogies or parallels between TV formats and plays or scripted dramas; or (2) to examine the nature of the TV format on its own merits, in terms of its original and identifiable structure and fixed elements. The first approach makes it very difficult to find copyright protection; the second has borne fruit in some of the cases. One possible reason for these divergent approaches may derive from the way in which the definition in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 of copyright ‘works’ has been implemented into national legislation. Where the national legislation defines a copyright work as one of a limited list of categories, the courts have been forced to take the ‘dramatic work’-analogy approach: in other words, to try to shoe-horn TV formats into a particular pre-defined box. On the other hand, where national copyright acts have more faithfully followed the Berne Convention illustrative list, there seems to be less of an intellectual challenge in finding possible copyright protection. This paper examines whether there are patterns that can be followed and, without moving into the subsequent issue of copyright infringement, the implications for TV format producers and distributors at the licensing stage.

This article examines the limited, but growing, body of case law in various jurisdictions which has addressed the question of copyright protection for TV formats. Two broad approaches can be identified on the part of the courts involved: (1) to try to draw analogies or parallels between TV formats and plays or scripted dramas; or (2) to examine the nature of the TV format on its own merits, in terms of its original and identifiable structure and fixed elements. The first approach makes it very difficult to find copyright protection; the second has borne fruit in some of the cases. One possible reason for these divergent approaches may derive from the way in which the definition in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 of copyright ‘works’ has been implemented into national legislation. Where the national legislation defines a copyright work as one of a limited list of categories, the courts have been forced to take the ‘dramatic work’-analogy approach: in other words, to try to shoe-horn TV formats into a particular pre-defined box. On the other hand, where national copyright acts have more faithfully followed the Berne Convention illustrative list, there seems to be less of an intellectual challenge in finding potential subsistence of copyright. This article looks to see whether there are patterns in the international treatment, concluding with a discussion of the Scandinavian position, as well as some commercial implications for TV format producers and distributors at the licensing stage. This article is only concerned with subsistence of copyright, and does not address infringement in any detail.

Book Review of 'Understanding the Global TV Format' by Albert Moran with Justin Malbon (Bristol, Intellect 2006) (ISBN 1-84150-132-8)

This paper focuses on the implications of the criminalization of copyright violations, the economics of law enforcement, and the incentives and disincentives for national criminal enforcement of copyrights purely from the economic point of view. It provides a model of optimal criminal enforcement of copyright based on those factors and an assessment of how effective criminalization will be. It does not focus on the general issues of the contributions of copyright to producer and national economies or whether and how harm occurs from appropriation.

This article surveys the scope of protection for television programme formats under English intellectual property law. It discusses what is meant by a 'TV format' and the growth in this phenomenon, and looks at the requirements for being a copyright work under English law and the circumstances in which such a work will be infringed, concluding that the law in this area is at best uncertain.

This article reviews the English case of Novello and Company Ltd v Keith Prowse Music Publishing Company Ltd (2004), the first case to consider the issue of how copyright in reversionary interests, which could not be assigned during the author's lifetime under the 1911 Copyright Act, may be assigned under later laws.