Conference: “The Reference as Part of the Art Form: A Turning Point in Copyright Law?”

The Federal Constitutional Court’s so-called “sampling” ruling (May 31, 2016, “Metall auf Metall”) is widely regarded as a milestone in the debate over the copyright implications of digital and referential media practices. In any case, it raises the question of whether the standards developed for sampling can also become relevant for other digital cultural practices such as fan fiction, collages, appropriation art, remixes, or mash-ups.

The conference “The Reference as Part of the Art Form: A Turning Point in Copyright Law?” on May 11 and 12, 2017, aims to discuss this question through an exchange among various stakeholder groups and to focus more closely on legislation and legal design as interactions between law, society, and media practices. The goal of the event is first to gain practical and media-studies-based insight into the various digital cultural practices, and then to explore the implications for copyright law as well as the current need for reform.

The conference is organized as a joint event by the Institute for Media and Communications Law at the University of Siegen and subproject B07 “Media Practices and Copyright Law—Social and Legal Frameworks for Cooperative and Derivative Creation on the Internet” of the DFG Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Dagmar Hoffmann and Prof. Dr. iur. Nadine Klass, LL.M. (Wellington), this project focuses in particular on fan fiction and analyzes what goals a modern copyright law—one that reflects current creative realities—should pursue based on empirical, legal-factual research.