Guest Blogger: Mira Burri

It is IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Mira Burri (left) as a guest blogger.
Mira is a Senior Research Fellow at the World Trade Institute, an interdisciplinary research center in Bern, Switzerland, and is also an adjunct lecturer in international media law at the University of Bern. Since 2005, she has served as the Alternate Leader of the research project 'eDiversity: The Protection of Cultural Diversity in a Digital Networked Environment' (IP7), which is part of the umbrella project of NCCR Trade Regulation.
She received her law degree from the University of Sofia and a Master of Advanced European Studies from the European University Institute of the University of Basel. Her doctoral thesis, published in 2007, dealt with the electronic communications and competition law of the European Communities; it was awarded the Professor Walther Hug Prize for one of the best doctoral theses in law in Switzerland.
Prior to joining the eDiversity project, Mira was a research fellow at the University of Lucerne and contributed actively to establishing i-call, a research center on International Communications and Art Law in Lucerne. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, of the Association of Internet Researchers, and of the Law and Society Association.
As her SSRN author page indicates, Mira's scholarship focuses on trade and culture. She is a co-editor of Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment (2008), Free Trade versus Cultural Diversity: WTO Negotiations in the Field of Audiovisual Services (2004), and Digital Rights Management: The End of Collecting Societies? (2005).
In her guest post below, Mira draws upon her paper, entitled "Trade and Culture: Keep the Border Fuzzy, Please," to examine paths to (re)conciliation between global trade and culture.
She dedicates her post to Dr. Emilie Kempin-Spyri (below right), about whom Mira writes:

Emilie Kempin-Spyri (1853–1901) was the first Swiss woman to study law. She was also the first to become a professor in the German-speaking part of Europe and had been a pioneer in promoting women’s rights. Thanks to her ardent efforts, in 1898 the law of Canton Zurich was amended to allow women to be admitted to the bar, despite the fact that they did not possess the right to vote at the time (this rule was implemented nationwide only in 1923).
Kempin-Spyrie has been credited with the formation and the success of the New York University's first woman's law class, held on October 30, 1890. Along with Mrs. Fanny B. Webber, Dr. Kempin also founded a legal aid society to assist the poor. Her influence on future generations of women in the legal profession, both as academics and as practitioners, is undoubtedly great and it is worth to pause a minute and think of her example.
Dr. Kempin was recently celebrated at the University of Zurich, where she had studied and taught, with the installation of an oversized chaise longue depicted below, made by the Swiss avant-garde artist Pipilotti Rist.

Today Kempin-Spyrie joins IntLawGrrls' other transnational foremothers in the list below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Trade & Culture: Paths to (Re)conciliation

My warm thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute a guest post. It is a splendid initiative to report on relevant international law topics from a female perspective (and I do love the pink background).
Having the IntLawGrrls’ floor, I would like to share some ideas stemming from my current research, which focuses on the relationship between trade and cultural norms at the international level, taking into particular account the impact of digital media. As a sort of a broader research agenda on the theme, I published an article in the Journal of International Economic Law. But lately, I have also been trying, in my paper entitled "Trade and Culture: Keep the Border Fuzzy, Please," to go a step further and discuss the fuzzy borders between trade and culture, and whether and how we could manage them in the contemporary media environment.
The pair “trade and culture” can be singled out and deservedly labelled as unique in the “trade and …” discourse. The reasons for this exceptional quality lie in three points:
► The first is the intensity of the relationship, which is indeed most often framed as “trade versus culture,” and has been a significant stumbling block, especially as regards audiovisual services during the Uruguay Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization (logo above left) and subsequently.
► The second specificity of the relationship is that the international community has organised its efforts in a rather effective manner to offset the lack of satisfying solutions within the WTO framework. The 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted under the auspices of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (logo below right), and the legally binding UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, came into force two years ago this month, are clear signs of the potency of the international endeavour, on the one hand, and of the (almost desperate) desire to contest the existing WTO norms in the field of trade and culture, on the other.
►A third distinctive characteristic of the relationship between trade and culture -- one that is rarely mentioned and blissfully ignored in any Geneva or Paris talks -- is that while the pro-trade and pro-culture opponents have been digging deeper into their respective trenches, the environment in which trade and cultural issues are to be regulated has radically changed. The emergence and wide spread of digital technologies have modified profoundly the conditions for cultural content creation, distribution and access, and have rendered some of the associated market failures obsolete, thus mitigating to a substantial degree the “clashing” nature of trade and culture. Under the conditions of the digital media space, any trade restriction may in fact be counterproductive to a thriving cultural environment, and the focus on “trade versus culture,” especially in the classical context of audiovisual services, may be too narrow and thus fail to recognise the augmented significance of other regulatory domains (such as intellectual property).
In this sense, there is a pressing need to re-evaluate the existing tools of media regulation, including those targeted at the protection and promotion of cultural diversity. Such regulatory experiments would certainly unfold first at the domestic level; however, paradoxical as it may sound, it could be that the WTO offers better solutions than UNESCO when these matters are to be taken up at the international level.