Internet Policy and German Copyright Regulation. A Subsystem Perspective to Assess Changes in Interest Group Dynamics and Policy-Making

Abstract

Despite the Internets’ transformative effect on information governance, e.g., copyright, it is very often neglected in practice and research on changes by and through Internet governance. To understand the policy-making in this area, the concept of a policy subsystem along the lines of the Advocacy Coalition Framework is introduced and special emphasize on Weible’s (2008) types of subsystems is given. As a typical case of European authors’ rights-based regulation, the German national policy on copyrights in the second half of the twentieth century is introduced as a policy subsystem. In two sections, we discuss two trends or descriptive hypothesis on the changes within copyright policy-making as it is revealed by existing research: Internationalization and the emergence of a national Internet policy subsystem assimilating copyright. As both trends are limited to date, both of the hypotheses cannot be verified (or have to be falsified for now). Internationalization impact is significant, but limited. Copyright subsumption to a new Internet policy logic is also limited to issue linkages. We thus offer a third, alternative description to the changes of the Urheberrecht subsystem: Drawing on the research literature and some own empirics, we can diagnose a change to adversarial subsystem dynamics within the last decade or every single category of Weible’s subsystem typology. Further research should fill empirical blind spots of the time before the changes as well as for causes, causal paths, or causal mechanisms.