Is Copyright Law Still Up to Date?
Photo Credit: Melina Jana Harzer
Paula Lou Riebschläger for Shifted News
Where does creative freedom end and intellectual theft begin? Michael Servatius is a doctoral candidate at Berlin's Humboldt University. His work focuses on the topic of copyright compensation claims for personal use of other people's creative ideas. He highlighted the thorny issue during his talk ‘Metall auf Metall, Kunstfreiheit und Urheberrecht’ on Stage 9 on Wednesday at 4pm.
Can you give me an example of the problems with copyright law?
There's a protracted lawsuit between Hip-Hop producer Moses Pelham and the band Kraftwerk. Pelham took a two-second sequence from Kraftwerk's track “Metall auf Metall” and produced a new beat off of it. Kraftwerk sued Pelham. And that litigation case has been going on for nineteen years. It shows that there is a conflict of interest between artistic freedom and the rights of creators. Currently, there are a lot of legal uncertainties in this area.
How important is European Law for that discussion?
This is quite interesting, because even the European understanding of law has shifted over the course of this legal battle. At the moment the European Court of Justice is on the case but the final verdict is still out.
How did courts decide in the past?
In this particular case the courts ruled in favour of Kraftwerk. But in 2016, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court decided that previous judgements didn’t didn't take into account enough for Pelham’s artistic freedom. So, that court sided with those using (other people's ideas) which means that the upcoming judgement of the European Court of Justice will be pointing the way.
What is the current situation for users? There's an increasing number of DJs and people remaking tracks who are using them for new creative output. What do they have to keep in mind?
A lot is happening right now. In practice, some things are being done that are actually not legally permitted but tolerated. Current policies tend to focus more on online platforms and press publishers.
How do big companies and content-generators deal with this topic?
There are various filter mechanisms that companies provide. With their system ‘Content-ID’, Google has made it possible that users upload content to YouTube and the system cross-checks it against existing content in a database. And yet, the algorithms are not perfect which causes a lot of problems.