Dateline Warsaw – Wiki protest

Presented by Peter Gentle

Welcome to Dateline Warsaw, where journalists discuss the top news stories in Poland and beyond. In the studio are Warsaw Dow Jones Bureau chief Marcin Sobczyk, the Daily Telegraph’s Matthew Day and head of Polish Radio's English Section John Beauchamp.

The war between old forms of media, such as movie studios, record labels, and the newer digital version – Google, Twitter, file sharing networks – warmed up another notch this week when Wikipedia blacked out its pages for 24 hours in protest against the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

It all begs the questions: are the old style copyright laws completely out of sink with the New Media and its New Ethics? And if the Time Warner business model is history, then what's going to replace it?

As the EC threatens all sorts of nasty sanctions against Hungary because its government wants to keep pledges to the voters that elected it, Dateline asks: does the EU, and its relationship with nation states, suffer from a 'democratic deficit'?

And why do patients often come out of doctors' surgeries in Poland with a list of drugs as long as an oniomaniac's shopping list?

All that, and more, in Dateline Warsaw.