Media Law - Introduction

Yesterday I had my first lecture of Media Law!

The professor Miha Šepec was very fun and interesting to listen to. I did eat Carniolan sausages and drink two green teas with milk, but that's just because one needs sustenance 😊

This may or may not be professor dr. Miha Šepec 😋

Important information from the lecture:

What is law? Law are a sort of restrictions that we've all agreed to follow, and if you don't follow them, there are sanctions, which is important, because law without sanctions, without realistic sanctions something that is notable has no power nor no meaning. The professor gave an example of, who would follow the parking law if the sanction was only 1€, to which his answer was pretty much noone.

Law is a system of many different subsystems, or in other words just 'Law' doesn't exist, but what it does is it encompasses various law that are placed over various different aspects of life. Few that we've listed were: 
- constitutional right; so how the government is built, how it functions, human laws, a law to live, as so on.
- civil law; relations between humans, the given example was if someone broke your phone, you could use this law, to either resolve the problem with the person or to have them pay you for a new phone, or something like that.
- criminal law; government against a person, this involves murders and other such criminal offences.
- administrative law; how to get a building permit, citizenship, ...
- family law; this dictates for how long your parents legally have to take care of you, which doesn't mean that they have to let you live under their roof, but if they do kick you out, this law does state that they need to give you some money with which you should be able to survive.
- inheritance law; who gets what when when someone dies, including last will and such.
- commercial law; various companies, how they operate, their structure, stock holding companies and so forth.
- labor and social law; relationship between employer and employee, your rights as an employee. Social support, child bonus...
- financial law - tax law; how much money the government takes away from you in every aspect of life aka. taxes.
- international law; relations between countries, rules of war, ...
There are more, but these were the most important to mention, or so professor said.

This concluded the introductory part of the lecture, we then started with some real content, although still mostly just skimming it over.

Media Law (this is one of the smaller ones, but still quite important, especially for me)
Here he mentioned that for the exam it is required to read the actual paper for the media law which includes around 50 chapters.

The content that we'll go over is as follows: 

• boundaries of press freedom (yes, I just found out where the bullets button is...),
• media trial, 
• privacy,
• hate speech
• online copyright dilemmas,
• advertising rules,
• journalistic ethics,
• ...

Most of these are quite self describing, which is good, because it makes my life easier, I just have to remember their names, and the rest should just come flowing through.

Roles of media in society

• modern age - the age of mass media and informatization of society,
• freedom of expression, freedom of will, a component of a democracy, a market of ideas, thinking, expression of human dignity.

Honestly, many of these don't mean much to me, by which I mean, that they don't have deeper meanings, but the professor did say that the law is written is such a objective way so that there's as few possibilities for exploitation as possible, which is, of course, good.

Functions of media:

• informing,
• shaping public opinion
  
• education
• entertainment

I've marked 'shaping public opinion' because that's an incredible important and powerful function of media. Because, as professor said, without it, Coronavirus wouldn't have been taken as seriously as it has been. But it is worth noting here that this power can and is also used for nefarious purposes.

And that was about it, also an important note: There will only be the final examination, no midterm exams!

Professor did say that his assistant will also tell us about some papers that we can write, which should assist us in finishing this class with a better grade.

Recommended literature: 

• Medijsko pravo; Einspieler Vili, Lampe Rok, Grčar Cene, Repanšek Jaka, Žirovnik Cvetka; 2009, Ljubljana; ISBN  978-961-6529-68-6.
  

Only one book, which is good, it only has 275 pages and I've already reserved my copy in the library!

I do hope that this year will be manageable, I do have to study a lot more, since I'm currently taking parallel courses, but luckily about half of it is via web conferences, which does make my life a bit easier, the only real problem are those that aren't via web and that are overlapping with my other lectures that also aren't via web...

Oh also, this subject, Media Law, is from the course Media Communications and the other course that I've parallelly studying is Subject teacher, at least that's the translation, basically I'm studying two field on which I can then teach others. Luckily if everything goes as planned I'll finish Media Communications this year and then I'll only have the Subject teacher one. The two fields that I've chosen are Educational Biology and Educational Chemistry, but thus far I've only had a short 30 min introductory lecture in Math, where I managed to ask the professor which books he recommends as I am quite frightened of math, because it was the reason that I dropped out of Computer and Information Technologies aka. Computer Science.

Thanks for reading me ^^, don't forget to check out bit.ly/InvestLove, to make your money work for you! (not a sales pitch :S, I just really like what they do, and have also placed my money into it)