Copyright Law

In October the Eighth Berlin Conference for Open Access took place in Beijing. Goethe.de spoke with Christoph Bruch about the Berlin Conferences.More ...

Creative Commons is a licensing system that enables authors to grant the rights to use their own work. It opposes copyright with a culture of the free exchange of intellectual property.More ...

“Open Access” is today a household name. Yet scientists and scholars still sometimes look upon the idea behind this publication project with scepticism. Now an action week has been organised with the intention of removing their reservations.More ...

There is talk of the “death of the textbook”, of “reading places as download stations”: in questions of copyright, the interest of publishers and libraries are sometimes difficult to reconcile.More ...

The discussion of the introduction of a “culture flat rate” that would allow Internet users to download and share songs or films upon payment of a fixed monthly or annual fee has entered a new round in response to the results of a short report presented by the Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary group in mid 2009.More ...

The EU Green Paper entitled “Copyright in the Knowledge Economy” has unleashed a debate on intellectual property in an age of digital data processing. In an interview, Gabriele Beger explains the position of the German Library Association.More ...

Digital rights management systems are supposed to protect copyrights, and yet they are also being used to undermine civil rights. We asked Dr Harald Müller, Chairman of the Legal Commission of the German Library Association (dbv), for his thoughts on the matter.More ...

The new Copyright Act has been in effect since January 2008. Not quite five years after the Act was last amended, a new balance has been struck between the interests of authors, exploiters, equipment producers and end-users, none of whom are, however, especially happy with the compromise solution.More ...