The Ethics of Access to Audiovisual Online Content

The project conducts a legal–ethical analysis of the conflict between creators, producers, and distributors on the one hand and consumers on the other concerning access to premium audiovisual online content (films, television series, sports broadcasts), whose availability within video-on-demand services is regulated through geographic blocking. The outcome of the analysis will be a proposal of (domain-specific) principles of the ethics of access to audiovisual online content, their application to concrete examples of moral conflict (decisions of the European Commission), and a critical reflection on the regulation of audiovisual online services (including legislation, legal principles, and their doctrinal interpretation).

Methodologically, the project enriches legal scholarship by applying approaches from applied ethics (methods of wide reflective equilibrium). In identifying and contextualizing moral positions, the project draws on primary qualitative research into the views of representatives of the relevant stakeholders and on secondary analyses of available data on the behavior and attitudes of consumers, as well as on industrial, production, and licensing practices of creators, producers, and distributors of audiovisual works in the Czech Republic and the European Union.

Outputs