Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Bretthauer, Lars --- "Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Movie Industry: Contemporary Political Conflicts in Germany" [2009] ELECD 534; in Haunss, Sebastian; Shadlen, C. Kenneth (eds), "Politics of Intellectual Property" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Politics of Intellectual Property

Editor(s): Haunss, Sebastian; Shadlen, C. Kenneth

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848443037

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Movie Industry: Contemporary Political Conflicts in Germany

Author(s): Bretthauer, Lars

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

8. Intellectual property rights
in the digital movie industry:
contemporary political conflicts in
Germany
Lars Bretthauer

INTRODUCTION

With the market introduction of digital technologies of reproduction
and consumption (DVD, DVD- and CD-burners, peer-to-peer technol-
ogy) during the late 1990s in Germany, political conflicts emerged among
artists, companies and consumers in the movie industry, state actors,
hardware-producers and German civil society actors. As in many other
countries, the German movie industry started a campaign with the slogan
`Copythieves are criminals', criticising consumers for the non-licensed
appropriation, exchange and consumption of digital movies. At the same
time, disputes evolved between companies and movie artists about the
limits of the German Urheberrecht (copyright law) in the digital age.
These conflicts were concerned with the different shares companies and
artists should earn out of the production and distribution of movies and
the economic potentials of the industry's transformation in the digital
age. Simultaneously the revision of the German Filmförderungsgesetz
(film funding law) fostered the strategic reorientation of state subsidies
for movie production from an artistically oriented form to a mode of
industrial policy.
In this chapter, I will discuss these three different lines of political conflict
in the processes of copyright and film funding law-making in the period
from 1998 until 2008 in Germany. These laws have undergone a process of
revision since the digitalisation of the industry. Drawing on contributions
from materialist state theories (Gramsci 1971; Jessop 1990; Poulantzas
1999 [1978]), I will discuss how ...