Innovation Workshop "Creativity and Copyright in the Net Economy"

• Press release from the Authority of Culture, Sports and Media 05.03.2010 (German)
• Website of the Innovation Workshop (German)

At the Hamburg International Media Dialogue on 8 June 2009, representatives of the media industry emphasised the importance of a fair copyright, adjusted to the conditions of the net economy. Advancements in this area do not only depend on political enforcement, they require conceptual reflection, which have to be of a quite fundamental nature in many areas.

Repeated legislative alignment of copyright law to new technical and economical conditions as well as lawsuits dealing with entire business models such as that of the entire music industry, of image search on the Internet or the handling of formerly unknown ways to use such contents increasingly demonstrate the limits of traditional legal constructions. Beyond the discussion about new “baskets” of copyright reform they gave reason to rethink the concept of “intellectual property” itself. Does the idea from Goethe’s period – that part of the artist’s personality is embodied in his work and he thus owns the work – still correspond to the conditions of the net economy? Couldn’t the potentials of the creative industry and society be exhausted more adequately if we consequently oriented the legal framework towards the objective to stimulate creativity? Does modern copyright law have to be constructed not only from the perspective of the creator, but also the user? How can performance be protected from exploitation?

The objective of the project was to develop and evaluate options, which help politics – on state, federal, and European level – to answer these fundamental questions. To this end, the academic innovation workshop pursued the question how copyright can be further developed in order to better make use of the potential of the creative industry and society. On the one hand, the project jointly with the media industry aimed to develop and evaluate options, which help politics to answer this question. On the other hand, the area of copyright is supposed to become more enshrined in academic research and teaching in Hamburg. Selected topics were the new ancilliary copyright demanded by the German publishers and law enforcement on the Internet.

With the innovation workshop, the Hans Bredow Institute tested a new form of problem-solution-oriented academic work; the workshop was organised by the Hans Bredow Institute at the University of Hamburg and supported by the Authority of Culture, Sports and Media.

Participants

• Prof. Dr. Michel Clement, University of Hamburg
• Dr. Christian Heinze, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Hengartner, University of Hamburg
• Prof. Dr. Gabriele Klein, University of Hamburg
• RA Dr. Till Kreutzer, Hans Bredow Institute/i.e. – Office for expertise on information law, Hamburg
• Dr. Kristoff Ritlewski, Bucerius Law School
• Dr. Wolfgang Schulz, Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research at the University of Hamburg
• Prof. Dr. Insa Sjurts, University of Hamburg/Investigation Commission on Media Concentration
• Dr. Andreas Stuhlmann, University of Hamburg, Research Center Media and Communication

International Advisors

• Prof. Dr. Niva Elkin-Koren, University of Haifa/New York University School of Law
• Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Wiebe, LL.M. (Virginia), Vienna University of Economics and Business
• Prof. Dr. Frederik Willem Grosheide, University of Utrecht
• Prof. Dr. Ian J Lloyd, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• Prof. Dr. Sylvia Kierkegaard, University of Southampton/Communication University of China (Beijing)
• Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane