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. (more…)

We have observed an interesting change of user behavior in peer-to-peer file sharing networks after the unexpected death of the legendary King of Pop Michael Jackson on June 25.

Our diagram shows the download behavior in popular P2P networks in Germany of Michael Jackson's discography (red line) and albums (all other lines) starting from July 1 until August 24. The data are normalized to a maximum number of file transfers.

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Today I gave a presentation at HITEC, the world’s largest hospitality technology event. Originally, I only wanted to pitch the use of bandwidth management technology to provide a business-grade hotel Internet access with quality of service guarantees for important applications. But after talking with a number of property managers and companies that provide IT services to them, another big issue came up: copyright infringements by guests for which the hotel as the Internet access provider is liable. (more…)

Since the successful days of Napster, file sharing of copyright-protected material — particularly in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — has been a serious threat to the established business models of the content industry. There have been numerous discussions about the real impact. Scientific papers show the whole range from negative to positive effects, or no effects at all. In my opinion, there are effects, indeed. Some of them are positive as file sharing can expose new music groups and authors to an audience. And some effects are negative as existing copyrights are definitely infringed to a huge extent in the net.

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