The Matter of Intellectual Property: Studying the Economic, Political and Cultural Nodes of the Contemporary Media Industries. 15th Media Mutations International Conference

Authors

Paola Brembilla (ed)
University of Bologna image/svg+xml
Marco Cucco (ed)
University of Bologna image/svg+xml
Christopher Meir (ed)
Carlos III University of Madrid image/svg+xml
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21428/93b7ef64.9d08c29f

Keywords:

Intellectual Property, Audiovisual Industries, Artificial Intelligence, Authorship, Streaming Platforms

Synopsis

This issue of Media Mutations addresses the theme of intellectual property (IP) in the audiovisual industries, recognizing its centrality from legal and economic as well as cultural and creative perspectives. IP represents a constitutive element of the audiovisual industry since the origins of cinema, through the birth and massification of television, up to the current revolutions triggered by streaming platforms and generative artificial intelligence.

The volume contributes to the contemporary academic and political debate, characterized by concerns related to the economic power of American platforms that make IP ownership a condition of their investments, and by the uncertainties created by the use of AI. These tensions have led to high-profile strikes in the United States and intense lobbying activities in Europe to obtain legislative protections for creative workers.

The collected articles analyze various dimensions of the relationship between IP and audiovisual industries: the legal implications of generative artificial intelligence and authorship issues; content strategies of streaming platforms such as Paramount+ and Netflix; narrative repurposing practices (remakes, reboots, requels, legacyquels); the role of fan agency and piracy; the importance of literary IPs for the transnational circulation of television series; and industrial logics that in contexts such as South Korea subordinate human wellbeing to IP protection.

Through case studies from American, European, and East Asian industries, the volume highlights how IP represents the central commodity in contemporary media industries, destined to acquire further relevance in the years to come.

Chapters

Author Biographies

Paola Brembilla, University of Bologna

she teaches Television and Digital Media. Her research interests concern the interplay of business models, narrative forms and socio-cultural contexts in serial narratives, especially TV series and media franchises. She is the author of articles, chapters and books, among which La televisione italiana. Storie, generi e linguaggi (with L. Barra and V. Innocenti, Pearson 2024), Franchise Mediali. Industrie, narrazioni, pubblici (Pàtron, 2023) and It’s All Connected. L’evoluzione delle serie TV statunitensi (Franco Angeli, 2018). With Ilaria A. De Pascalis, she edited the volume Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes (Routledge, 2018).

Marco Cucco, University of Bologna

Marco Cucco is Associate Professor and Head of the postgraduate Master in Film and Audiovisual Management at the Department of Arts, University of Bologna, where he serves as coordinator of the PhD Program in “Arts, History, Society”. He received his PhD in Communication Sciences at the University of Lugano (Switzerland), and he has been visiting scholar at several universities: City University of New York (USA), Université de Lorraine (France), University of Leeds (UK), and Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium). His research interests concern mainly the film industry and policy. He wrote three books and many articles published by peer-reviewed journals like Studies in European Cinema, Film Studies, European Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Transcultural Communication, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. He is currently vice-chair of the Film Studies Section of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association).

Christopher Meir, Carlos III University of Madrid

Christopher Meir is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He has published widely on industrial issues and European cinema, including the monograph Mass Producing European Cinema: Studiocanal and Its Works (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the edited collection European Cinema in the Streaming Era: Policy, Platforms, and Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), which he co-edited with Roderik Smits. He has also acted as a consultant on issues related to streaming platforms for organizations including the European Commission, Eurimages and the European Audiovisual Production Association (CEPI). Along with Petar Mitric, he authored a report for CEPI which dealt specifically with intellectual property rights in the European audiovisual industries.

Downloads

PDF

Published

December 5, 2025

Series

Conference Proceedings
Copyright (c) 2025 The Authors

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about this monograph

ISBN-13 (15)

9788894731835

How to Cite

Brembilla, P., Cucco, M., & Meir, C. (Eds.). (2025). The Matter of Intellectual Property: Studying the Economic, Political and Cultural Nodes of the Contemporary Media Industries. 15th Media Mutations International Conference. Media Mutations Publishing. https://doi.org/10.21428/93b7ef64.9d08c29f