Passing the Copyright Protection Buck
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 by Hendrik Schulze
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…)
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.