Cushla Kapitzke is the next speaker here at ATOM2006. She focusses on the implications of copyright law changes in the wake of the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and how they may impact on media educators. She notes the rise of a large variety of neologisms - postindustrialism, fast capitalism, the information age, the creative economy, postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalisation, and McDonaldisation - even while the U.S. remains firmly routed in the traditional assumptions of modernity in a variety of ways. Libraries, for example, are often still excellently set up, but remain largely empty as they've failed to engage with the post-modern information needs of their clients. Cushla suggest a set of epochal shifts, from ancient ceremony to the traditional library of modernity, to the new 'libr@ry' which is being explored developed in a number of configurations by various organisations.

Tartu
Wolter Pieters starts the post-lunch session at CATaC 2006. He describes current moves towards e-voting as they have happened here in Estonia and elsewhere: is Internet voting the future? Estonia was the first country to use e-voting in local elections, but in the Netherlands and elsewhere there still exist many questions around it. There are promises that e-voting would increase voter turnout, but the Estonian experience does not necessarily support this - here, e-voting was introduced for its ease rather than to increase participation.

Dresden
We're continuing in a law and policy vein. The final session for today is on the potential for a democratisation of IT infrastructures. Dan Wielsch is the first presenter, focussing on infrastructure governance. He notes that the governance principles of distribution technology are changing - more people than ever before have access to the means of information production and exchange, drastically reducing entry costs to communication (also known as 'cheap speech'). This is markedly different from the previous industrial information economy, of course. In the new network information economy there is a serious increase in non-market content production, leading to more and more diverse content and content producers.

Dresden
We've now moved to a plenary session on converging media policy. Now that media convergence is finally starting to happen, there may be a number of crucial effects of this development, and there need to be new policy approaches to address them. The first speaker is Edgar Berger, the CEO of Sony BMG Germany. He begins by discussing the impact of digital technologies on the music industry. To begin with, business is now no longer done only with specialised retailers - music is also being licenced to telcos, games developers, online content providers, and many other partners. The music video market is also changing: videos are now being downloaded for a fee by users rather than being distributed for free to music television stations. For the consumer, the experience of music has also changed thoroughly - it is now available anywhere, anytime through the Internet and mobile devices in a wide variety of forms including ringtones, mobile video, and other new digital formats. There is special growth in the mobile world, and in what's called dual delivery - consumers buying a song once for access on mobiles and PC-based media. Digital media also changes the creative process: consumers discover musical acts on the Internet and it is only after this discovery that contracts are signed with music industry players. The question of 'piracy' is also raised here, and Berger restates very clearly Sony BMG's commitment to pursuing 'piracy', while balancing this with consumer rights (but remains vague on how he intends to do this). Is digitisation a risk or an opportunity for the music industry, then? There is a dual strategy here - of combatting copyright infringement while embracing the opportunities of digital media at the same time.