Is Media Law a red-carpet event?-Arunima Jha
Media Law sounds really glamorous but it’s not like all red-carpet events. Sadly, no red-carpet event for us; we generally don’t get invited to those.
My work involves structuring deals and looking out the contract for distribution in the same way that you would try and finance the projects. Chances are if you look at all those little icons on your phone, many of them I would have already worked with. I also do a lot of work in the music space and an awful lot in the advertising space.
You really need to have a great knowledge of the industry itself. The media industry is not a very organized industry as telecom or any other industry and sometimes it’s hard to find finance for content production. I think the other thing that’s really interesting in this region is that we have people from numerous languages and different cultures, so as a content creator that means finding more distribution outlets & that’s something that we’re already doing really well in Indian Media Industry.
Most of my work is transactional so I generally tend to work on contracts, but the more interesting stuff is the regulatory stuff i.e. what can I say and what I cannot say. I do a lot of at-work advertising so we will be looking at the ASCI rules and the CPA, and CCPA to interpret a particular matter. And that to me is more interesting because it is very nuanced and reliant on what the government’s view is of particular content. So, you’re not just looking at the boldface words but you’re looking at the intention behind those words & trying to work within the guidelines to get the content that you want. I find that sort of work really interesting.
It would be helpful if there are more content outlets potentially now with technology having an impact. We also have social media streaming services such as Netflix all of that I mean also has an impact on the legal industry right now. Well the change, the big change for me is that most of my clients are now not necessarily sitting in India but they’re sitting out across the region generally overseas or in the US or Europe and they’re looking and at this market and trying to work out how they can infiltrate Indian market and bluntly get revenue from the consumers that are sitting in this market. So, what we’re trying to do then, is we’re trying to get an understanding of what the cultural norms are here to somebody in Los Angeles or New York or in Frankfurt who has zero concepts of what this region actually stands for. In a sense, a lot of our laws are reflective of what society wants. They’re not dictating but they’re reflective.
Even the great thing about the Covid shutdown globally was that people immediately went to content as their first choice of things to do outside, after obviously learning how to bake bread, we all got done in the first month. So of course Media industry is ever-evolving and so are the laws.
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