Media & Entertainment Law

Publisher: Routledge

Author: Ursula Smartt

Price: £29.99

Edition: 1st Edition (April 2011)

ISBN: 978-0-415-57756-4

Buy from Routledge: Click Here

For the last ten years or so, media and entertainment law has become an important feature of our legal system.  Even a cursory reading of the papers will reveal stories of celebrities seeking to obtain injunctions (or super-injunctions) or claiming an invasion of their privacy.  This has plainly led to an increase in the teaching of this topic at undergraduate level: Ursula Smartt's Media & Entertainment Law aims to help students tackling the law for the first time.

Written by an experienced academic, Media & Entertainment Law is separated into eleven chapters: media freedom; privacy and confidentiality; defamation; contempt of court; reporting legal proceedings; freedom of public information; blasphemy, obscenity and censorship; copyright I (intellectual property); copyright II (entertainment law); and regulatory bodies and self regulation.  The coverage is a challenging but achievable gallop through various fields of law.

Despite covering such a wide range of legal topics, Media & Entertainment Law is well-structured and superbly laid out.  For me, the most striking feature of the text is its readability: pages are quickly turned and key points are driven home by the use of excellent examples.  For example, Smartt considers the topical issue of file sharing in the context of copyright by referring to the seminal decisions (including the background facts) in Napster and The Pirate Bay.  These cases expertly draw together the various issues raised throughout Media & Entertainment Law.

Ursula Smartt's Media & Entertainment Law is a thought-provoking account of the law but, at the same time, written in a practical way.  Its practical approach is, however, underpinned by theory which allows the reader to properly understand the law.  By the time of writing, a companion website has yet to be developed (which is unsurprising given its publication date).  If, however, the companion site includes the promised annual update, Media & Entertainment Law will no doubt quickly become an important text for anyone studying this fast-developing area of law.

Reviewed on 29 August 2011

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