Contexts practice questions.

Under the revised EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, on-demand services offered in the European Union must reserve at least 30% of their catalogue for European works and give those works prominence. Which effect on cultural production is this obligation intended to have?

• More works are commissioned in European languages and settings
• Streaming traffic on European networks is reduced at peak times
• Subscription prices fall for viewers in smaller member states
• Viewers are prevented from watching works made outside Europe

Answer: More works are commissioned in European languages and settings

The quota is a supply-side measure: reserving catalogue space and prominence pulls commissioning money towards European production rather than restricting what viewers may watch. Prominence matters as much as the share, because a title nobody is shown is not really in the catalogue.

The Korean-language series Squid Game, released by a global streaming service in September 2021, was watched in many countries with subtitles and dubbing. A student cites it as evidence of cultural homogenisation. Which observation most directly weakens that claim?

• The same platform interface and recommendation system is used in every market
• Most viewers outside Korea watched a dubbed version rather than the original audio
• The work was made inside one national industry and travelled outwards from it
• The series was released on the same date in every country where the service operates

Answer: The work was made inside one national industry and travelled outwards from it

Homogenisation would mean local production converging on one dominant origin, whereas here a national industry exported its own work, which reverses the usual direction of flow. The uniform interface is a genuinely homogenising force, but that is a claim about distribution rather than about what gets produced.

Te Hiku Media, a Maori broadcaster in Aotearoa New Zealand, gathered recordings from thousands of speakers to build speech recognition for te reo Maori and released the resulting data under a licence that keeps decisions about reuse with the communities who provided it. Which implication of that choice matters most to those speakers?

• Recognition accuracy is higher than any commercial system achieves
• Decisions about reuse of the recordings stay with the community
• Anyone may reuse the recordings provided the source is credited
• Storage costs fall because fewer audio files have to be kept

Answer: Decisions about reuse of the recordings stay with the community

The licence, not the model, is where power sits: it decides who may later train systems on the community's voices and for what purpose. The option about crediting the source describes a permissive Creative Commons style licence, which is exactly what this arrangement was designed not to be.

In 2023 the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA reached agreements with United States studios that limited the use of generative AI in scripts and required consent and payment for digital replicas of performers. Which stakeholder interest do those clauses most directly protect?

• Studios' ability to release the same film in more languages at once
• Audiences' access to new releases at a lower subscription price
• Platforms' capacity to store and stream higher-resolution video
• Performers' control over reuse of their likeness and voice

Answer: Performers' control over reuse of their likeness and voice

The dispute was about consent and payment for reuse, so the clauses attach to the performer's likeness rather than to the technology itself. Treating it as a fight against a tool misses that the same tool became acceptable to the unions once consent and residual payment were attached.

After the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019, laser scans of the cathedral made in 2015 for architectural research were used in planning its reconstruction. Which implication for cultural heritage does this best illustrate?

• A digital copy removes the need to conserve the physical building
• Records made for one purpose can become irreplaceable for another
• Ownership of a monument passes to whoever holds its scan data
• A monument's value lies in its documentation rather than its fabric

Answer: Records made for one purpose can become irreplaceable for another

The scans were never made as an insurance policy, which is why heritage bodies now treat documentation as preservation infrastructure rather than as a by-product of research. The claims that a copy replaces the fabric, or that the record is the monument, are the standing errors here.

A widely used machine translation service works well between Spanish and English but poorly for a language whose speakers have produced few digitised texts. Which implication for that language community is most significant?

• Tools that assume a large text record serve the community worst
• The community's language will be encoded in the Unicode Standard later
• The community cannot use smartphones until the service is improved
• The community's language becomes easier for outsiders to learn unaided

Answer: Tools that assume a large text record serve the community worst

These systems learn from parallel texts, so a scarcity of digitised material is reproduced as a scarcity of service, and the gap widens as more public services move online. Encoding is a separate question: a script can sit in the Unicode Standard and still have almost no training data behind it.