American Exceptionalism, the French Exception, and Digital Media Law

This volume explores and explains sameness and difference between the United States and France in the matters of freedom of expression on the Internet, the management of the tensions that arise between freedom of expression and the right of privacy of public figures, the comparative role of interest groups in the regulation of Internet content in both countries, the intellectual property implications of the digitization and transfer of journalistic works from print to searchable electronic databases, how courts in the United States and France managed the copyright issues that were triggered by the Google Book Search project, as well as the clash between intellectual property rights and freedom of expression in the area of parody or “gripe” web sites on the Internet. The volume presents American exceptionalism and the French exception as functionally equivalent logics that lead to different freedom of expression outcomes. This book makes a significant contribution to comparative communication law studies, an area that has not received serious academic interest.