Annett Gröschner und Christian Hippe (Hrsg.). Laxheit in Fragen Geistigen Eigentums. Brecht und Urheberrecht

Summary

When I agreed to review this book, the documentation of the Brecht-Tage 2016, I was not thinking ahead. The issues interest me and I wanted to read the book. However, in my work as editor of successive volumes of the English-language edition of Brecht, I have developed a considerable respect for Brecht's own practices of appropriation and collective creativity (how could it be otherwise!) and, more important in this context, I have benefited from very good relations with the Brecht heirs and their agents and, of course, with both Suhrkamp and the English-language publishers, Bloomsbury (previously Methuen) and Norton. These relationships remain important to me. Can I be a dispassionate critic? Maybe not.

The idea of intellectual property is relatively new, as Katharina de la Durantaye reminds us in the present volume. For centuries it was the greatest service one could render to repeat the wisdoms of the Ancients or to imitate their art. Senses of authorship and of the value of originality and/or imitation have changed with the years, as have the meaning and legal force of words like plagiarism and copyright; and there are still significant differences internationally in the framing of the issues, as well as in interpretation and practice. German law distinguishes between “Urheberrecht” and “Verwertungsrecht,” and “Urheberrecht” itself has only been a concept in German law since 1870. Gradually, the bourgeois commitment to the “individual” and the romantic cult of the “original” conspired with a capitalist investment in the trade in both wisdom and art to create a monster: international copyright law is a mess and a scandal and far from fit for purpose in the digital age. That is something on which we can probably all agree. With the possible exception of Rainer Dresen, the house attorney for Random House, who, towards the end of the book under consideration here, professes an extraordinary confidence in the adequacy of the current legal state of affairs. In contrast, some of the limits and absurdities of contemporary law are elegantly laid out, much earlier, in Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen's “statement” which forms the second chapter of the volume.