Culture is future » Innovation and digital

Always Further - Germany and copyright, a new law?

In May, the German minister of state to the Federal Chancellor and federal government commissioner for culture and the media, Bernd Neumann announced copyright law reforms. He stressed that this would be in favor of authors and creators, not users. It contrasts with the project of  global licence proposing a flat tax for the culture that had been advanced by the Green politics recently, and rejected. He also called on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take responsibility and said he was in favor of a warning system much like the France’s HADOPI laws. The framework of the project is undetermined yet, but this reform could emerge in 2013, after the elections. A period that disappoints publishers and music industry in Germany.

This announcement reflects a shift in German politic, as in the debate surrounding the ACTA (December 2009), Germany had clearly rejected the graduated response, considering this approach of piracy wrong. Also in June 2010, the German Federal Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, in a speech on copyright at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, said that the system of current copyright law is obsolete stating that "we simply cannot use the mechanisms from analog to digital world." Then making a critic of the business models of copyright holders, who are opposed to the pratictices developed on the Internet instead of adapting to it, she said that the German government does not want to "create an hospital for these business models, their time is up. " Finally she mentioned her regret in view of the attitude of the ISPs and whised they can take responsibility and called for a harmonization of the management of copyright in Europe.

Credits: Heinrich Böll Stiftung