Not only does Germany have copyright, it is the reason why Disney was able to bully around the US into the last major copyright term extension.
On a more meta note, I'm noticing a pattern where people figure that jurisdictional or cultural differences constitute such a dramatic difference that "insert crazy copyright law here" is just assumed to not apply in their local jurisdiction, or that it will never apply to them. It will. There might be cases where you do have cultural differences, but copyright isn't one of them. Copyright enjoys deep international consensus on almost every issue, and the only practical differences between jurisdictions are things like:
- Should copyright terms be long (life+50), extra-long (life+70), or practically forever (up to life+100)?
- Should authors be allowed to unwind licensing agreements and copyright transfers?
- Can an author intentionally destroy their own copyright interest in a work? Or does "public domain" only include works whose copyright has naturally expired?
- Do authors enjoy moral rights to their work? If so, can those rights be waived or not?
- Do online services need to proactively filter content in order to avoid copyright liability, or is merely offering no-questions-asked takedowns to copyright owners enough?
- Do you need to register your copyright in order to sue?
Y'know, things "on the margins" of copyright.
It's important not to understate how ridiculously radical the stereotypical hacker position on copyright is. Even avowed Communists were willing to continue a watered-down copyright regime[0] despite having a legal system that specifically considered profit to be a form of exploitation and regularly charged people with things like "social parasitism". The kinds of people here who would like to see copyright abolished or reformed into oblivion are, in one sense at least, "to the left[1] of Soviet Russia". Everywhere else, people hold copyright as a base assumption. This includes "America", "the Anglosphere", "the West", and any other division you want to talk about to make your point that you don't think the law applies when it does.
[0] Strictly speaking, I've been told by actual Russian emigrants who lived under Soviet rule that copyright wasn't a thing people worried about until the fall of Communism. However, this is also concomitant with copyright interests in capitalist countries being increasingly worried about consumer-level copyright infringement. What I do know is that the laws on the books did exist, but I suspect they were only used against state-owned publishing enterprises, as that would fit in with the general ideas behind Socialist law better.
The Soviets were actually worried about the masses copying music before the RIAA was. However, this had less to do with copyright and more to do with censorship: before the 1970s importing western music was hella illegal. There actually were bootleg music copying rings at that time; they'd copy the music onto makeshift vinyl records made out of old X-ray prints.
[1] Insamuch as "left" without additional qualifiers is even a meaningful term at that point.
On a more meta note, I'm noticing a pattern where people figure that jurisdictional or cultural differences constitute such a dramatic difference that "insert crazy copyright law here" is just assumed to not apply in their local jurisdiction, or that it will never apply to them. It will. There might be cases where you do have cultural differences, but copyright isn't one of them. Copyright enjoys deep international consensus on almost every issue, and the only practical differences between jurisdictions are things like:
- Should copyright terms be long (life+50), extra-long (life+70), or practically forever (up to life+100)?
- Should authors be allowed to unwind licensing agreements and copyright transfers?
- Can an author intentionally destroy their own copyright interest in a work? Or does "public domain" only include works whose copyright has naturally expired?
- Do authors enjoy moral rights to their work? If so, can those rights be waived or not?
- Do online services need to proactively filter content in order to avoid copyright liability, or is merely offering no-questions-asked takedowns to copyright owners enough?
- Do you need to register your copyright in order to sue?
Y'know, things "on the margins" of copyright.
It's important not to understate how ridiculously radical the stereotypical hacker position on copyright is. Even avowed Communists were willing to continue a watered-down copyright regime[0] despite having a legal system that specifically considered profit to be a form of exploitation and regularly charged people with things like "social parasitism". The kinds of people here who would like to see copyright abolished or reformed into oblivion are, in one sense at least, "to the left[1] of Soviet Russia". Everywhere else, people hold copyright as a base assumption. This includes "America", "the Anglosphere", "the West", and any other division you want to talk about to make your point that you don't think the law applies when it does.
[0] Strictly speaking, I've been told by actual Russian emigrants who lived under Soviet rule that copyright wasn't a thing people worried about until the fall of Communism. However, this is also concomitant with copyright interests in capitalist countries being increasingly worried about consumer-level copyright infringement. What I do know is that the laws on the books did exist, but I suspect they were only used against state-owned publishing enterprises, as that would fit in with the general ideas behind Socialist law better.
The Soviets were actually worried about the masses copying music before the RIAA was. However, this had less to do with copyright and more to do with censorship: before the 1970s importing western music was hella illegal. There actually were bootleg music copying rings at that time; they'd copy the music onto makeshift vinyl records made out of old X-ray prints.
[1] Insamuch as "left" without additional qualifiers is even a meaningful term at that point.