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Backgrounds and earlier developmentsin GermanyIn Germany during the first half of 2012, the controversiesregarding copyright —and indirectly piracy as well— havegrown from a niche discussion of the web community intoa mainstream debate on the fundamentals of civil rights,individual freedoms, and the general values of society. Anumber of factors contributed to this expansion.Concerns about privacy and the rights of the individualhave a long political history going back to the totalitarianregime of the Nazis and to the secret police spying on everycitizen in the socialist part of the country during the ColdWar until 1989. The risks stemming from publicly availableprivate information on citizens brought about by informationtechnologies have been debated on and off sincethe 1980s.Today, the web community holds its own kind of digitaltown meetings, and digital monitoring of the populationhas brought about protests against street-scanning initiativesby Google as well as tracking and consolidating datatraces on individuals for criminal investigations. Recent legalaction against highly popular movie streaming servicessuch as Kino.to found similar broad media coverage,as did the controversy over WikiLeaks and Julian Assange,the arrest of German-born digital pirate Kim (Dotcom)Schmitz, and the Anonymous movement, which has abroad following in Germany. A formerly marginal politicalgroup called the Pirate Party has become a platform for allkinds of protest initiatives, ready to campaign for enteringGerman parliament whenever the next general electionsare called.The content industry, spearheaded by the professional organizationsfor cinema and music but supported as wellby Börsenverein, is lobbying for various extensions of lawsto fight the illegal usage of copyrighted material and callingfor stricter laws obliging internet service providers tohand over user data for prosecution by the authorities. Itis joined in these activities by various authors’ initiativesunder the slogan “Ja zum Urheberrecht” (“Yes to author’srights”), led by a group of crime writers. Around 1,500authors signed the various petitions (Der Spiegel, May 10,2012).A broad wave of filings in 2011 and 2012 on behalf of thecontent industry resulted in thousands and thousands oflegal notices and penalty payments against private citizensfor infringements, backed up by PR campaigns withgraphic images depicting the creators of artistic work asviolated corpses. The result was a deepening of the riftbetween the rights owners and the consumers.In summer 2012, Börsenverein started a new campaign topromote a model similar to the Hadopi approach in France:warnings displayed whenever a user accesses unauthorizedcontent on the Web.As confrontations rage in various arenas of the battle, Börsenverein—the central actor in the book publishing realmas opposed to other media such as music or film— announceda change of strategy in June 2012. Earlier gospelwas that a new adaptation of copyright legislation withregard to digital was not necessary as long as current lawwas enforced. Gottfried Honnefelder, the organization’sacting president, stated at a forum of publishers in Berlinthat the Internet was, after all, a new challenge for communicationand cultural development: “As a result, wemust acknowledge that copyright legislation falls behindthe reality of life in certain regards,” hindering more thanencouraging the expression of creativity. Hence certainchanges in the legislation must be considered, and thecultural industries are called upon to spearhead such innovation(keynote of Gottfried Honnefelder at BuchtageBerlin, June 2012). The practical consequences of this shiftare not yet entirely clear.Several specialized studies on ebook piracy in Germanyhave been conducted by industry organizations as well asindependent research teams.Börsenverein launched a survey on the emerging ebookmarket in Germany in March 2011 (a summary is availablehere) and followed up in late August 2011, in collaborationwith two other organizations of content industries, withits first comprehensive study on the topic: “Usage of DigitalContent”, (“Digitalen Content-Nutzung” or DCN).Key findings of the industry-sponsored study included afigure of 14.3 million Germans (or 22% of the total population)who had downloaded media content from the Internetin 2010, of which 3.7 million downloaded piratedcontent. Share-hosting platforms such as RapidShare dominatedillegal downloads of movies, TV programs, andmusic; “ebooks are exchanged remarkably often via email,”according to the study. In a growing number of cases, entiremedia libraries saved on external memory devices areillegally exchanged between users. In 2010, 17% of the totalpopulation of Germany, and almost 40% of those between10 and 29 years old, admitted to having swappedmedia content on external memory.102 The Global eBook Report