Sometimes it seems to me that in Germany some political and social decisions take longer than in the rest of the world. This was my impression when I listened to the panel discussion at the GVU Branchenforum in Berlin last week.

GVU, a German organization against copyright infringements, did a good job and invited a great variety of guests. Not only representatives of the content industry participated in the discussion, but also a state attorney, a representative of the German ISP’s association eco and the chief editor of gulli, a portal that calls itself “worst pirate cave”. This diversity made the discussion really controversial and fascinating.

In the end it mirrored the situation in Germany. Many different opinions, several approaches to solving the copyright issue, but no mutual solution. The reason is very simple: every party involved only saw its own advantages and disadvantages.

The dilemma is obvious: even if everybody agreed that Internet piracy is a very bad thing, in terms of fighting it the buck was passed to all others. But effective countermeasures do only come with mutual agreements. And therefore it’s the right thing to bring all parties to a round table, like GVU did last week. It is also important to include the opposition. For example, Lars Sobiraj (gulli) had astoundingly reasonable ideas when it came to the copyright protection issues. After all it is an exchange like this which prevents worst-case scenarios such as Internet blockades for single websites, as it was requested from some representatives of the content industry.

Even though no specific solution was found this time, it is a good start to engage all stakeholders in a discussion. More of these discussions will be needed in the future. Undoubtedly, legal guidelines need to be established. Thus, involvement, will and courage of politics are required. Unfortunately, none of the invited politicians showed up at this event in Berlin.

Tags: copyright, copyright infringement, copyright protection, GVU

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 17:15:11 by Hendrik Schulze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.