Jean Baudrillard, the famous French postmodern philosopher, describes in his essay on Simulacrum a world in which people believe not in reality as such, but in the reality of a virtual world. This "matrix-like" feeling is similar to the present atmosphere in Intellectual Property law. Virtual reality, at least in Continental Europe, describes Copyright law as a well balanced system including the rights of authors versus the interests of the public. But the inherent justice of the intellectual property system has changed under the surface. More and more industrial goods are protected under copyright law; the rights of authors have mostly been transferred to large corporations. The rights of the public to get free access to works is in the process of being undermined by DRM and a new trend to narrow fair use and similar exemptions in copyright law. So copyright law becomes more and more an area of the "simulacra".

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoeren is one of Europe's leading Intellectual Property Lawyers. He is Head of the Institute for Information, Telecommunications and Media Law at the University of Münster (Germany) and a judge at the Court of Appeal in Düsseldorf (Germany). He has been a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute; and is a lecturer at the Faculties of Law in Vienna, Zurich and Virginia (USA).