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Law is force of order. It reacts, usually with a necessary time delay, to technological pro-gress. Only twelve years after Samuel Morse presented the first workable telegraph sys-tem in New York in 1838 and six years after the first completed telegraph line from Wash-ington to Baltimore, central European states agreed on an international framework for tel-egraphs. It has been much more than twelve years since the technologies underlying the internet’s popularity today, such as the ‘World Wide Web’, were invented. No international framework has emerged, even though normative approaches abound. There are norms that are applied to the internet, but the recognition of the existence of an underlying, structuring order is missing. This motivates the present study.
Europe is a key normative power. Its legitimacy as a force for ensuring the reign of rule of law in international relations is unparalleled. It also packs an economic punch. In data protection and the fight against cybercrime, European norms have been successfully globalized. The time is right to take the next step: Europe must now become the international normative leader for developing a new deal on internet governance. To ensure this, European powers should commit to rules that work in security, economic development and human rights on the internet and implement them in a reinvigorated IGF.
This article documents and classifies instances of transnational intellectual property (IP) enforcement and licensing on the Internet with a particular focus on the territorial reach of the respective regimes. Regarding IP enforcement, I show that the bulk of transnational or even global measures is adopted in the context of “voluntary” self-regulation by various intermediaries, namely domain name registrars, access and host providers, search engines, and advertising and payment services. Global IP licensing is, in contrast, less prevalent than one might expect. It is practically limited to freely accessible Open Content, whereas markets for fee-based services remain territorially fragmented. Overall, three layers of IP governance on the Internet can be distinguished. Based on global licenses, Open Content is freely accessible everywhere. Plain IP infringements are equally combatted on a worldwide scale. Territorial fragmentation persists, instead, in the market segment of fee-based services and in hard cases of conflicts of IP laws/rights. All three universal norms (global accessibility, global illegality, global fragmentation) are supported by a quite solid, “rough” global consensus.
According to the prevailing view, the purpose of digital copyright is to balance conflicting interests in exclusivity on the one hand and in access to information on the other. This article offers an alternative reading of the conflicts surrounding copyright in the digital era. It argues that two cultures of communication coexist on the internet, each of which has a different relationship to copyright. Whereas copyright institutionalizes and supports a culture of exclusivity, it is at best neutral towards a culture of free and open access. The article shows that, depending on the future regulation of copyright and the internet in general, the dynamic coexistence of these cultures may well be replaced by an overwhelming dominance of the culture of exclusivity.
This publication aims to provide an overview on how digitalisation of communication results in societal trends such as an “always-on” culture, “shitstorms”, “fake news” and their effects on schools, media, non-governmental organisations, work and sports.
Table of Contents
Christian Reuter, Tanjev Schultz, Christian Stegbauer: Digitalisation and Communication: Societal Trends and the Change in Organisations — Preface
Daniel Lambach: Digital World and Real World – Opposites no more
Leonard Reinecke: Brave New Smartphone World? Psychological Wellbeing between Digital Autonomy and Constant Connectedness
Christian Reuter: Fake News and the Manipulation of Public Opinion
Christian Stegbauer: Tantrums on a Massive Scale, or: Could Anybody be a Victim of Social Media Outrage?
Volker Schaeffer: “We Have Always Been Living in Bubbles” The Opportunities and Risks in the Digitalisation of Media
Angela Menig, Verena Zimmermann, Joachim Vogt: Digital Transformation of the Workplace – Risk or Opportunity?
Stefan Aufenanger, Jasmin Bastian: Digital Technology in Schools
Angelika Böhling: Development Assistance Goes Digital - The Opportunities and Challenges Non-Governmental Organisations Face in Digital Communication
Josef Wiemeyer: Digital Interaction and Communication in Sports