ABSTRACT
Is copyright a universal or a context-dependent institution? Is copyright’s primary concern the protection of authors’ rights or the streamlining and expansion of global markets? Does scale (size of the economy, expansion capacity of the cultural industries, global positionality etc.) influence the orientation and application of copyright? Has copyright been a consistent institution, merely supplemented and extended on a regular basis following the “natural” course of economic development and technological change or is copyright regulation the result of specific constellations of interests and power struggles? Is copyright a natural or a statutory right and what consequences do such philosophical substantiations and legal doctrines bring along? How have social actors (authors, publishers, various intermediaries, lawyers, consumers etc.) argued and legitimized their own positionality in the field of culture and the striving for copyright regulation? What is the dynamic between national and international exchange and how significant is their entanglement for the configuration of the global copyright regime?
