Internet Policy, Sub-system Dynamics and the Legacy of German Copyright Regulation

As policy making in liberal democracies seems to be subordinated into semi-autonomous subsystems, policy change is either incremental - little and often - or punctuated (rarely and huge). Copyright policy in Germany resembles this description in its 200-year history until the Internet hit media industries in 1999. Since then, policy makers seem to fail in steering, because two huge reforms in 2003 and 2007 as well as another “bunch” of regulations in 2013 could not settle the disputed issues. While another third huge reform package is in preparation for 2016, todays’ policy changes in German copyright are neither incremental nor punctuated. On the one hand, the Internets' disruptive power on economic sectors is well known, which hits subsystem coalitions as an external shock and kick-started high levels of interest group conflict. But this cannot explain for continuous and, indeed, rising conflictual politicization is not self-evident. External shocks are only known for punctuated major policy change and they are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for conflict and policy change. On the other hand, such predictions hold for fully developed, mature subsystems, which is issue-centred interaction networks of actors for semi-autonomous policy making, while a new, nascent subsystem is missing such characteristics. And indeed, many scholars see a new subsystem on Internet policy developing that will soon encompass all Internet issues. Instead, this seemingly unusual development may very well be the birth period of a new subsystem. While the developing process of subsystems is still unknown, ACF scholars find actor dissatisfaction in established subsystems as one of the initial situations for subsystem development. Whatever the result of this on-going process may be, both of the interpretations point to interaction of actors in their subsystem context. First, actors are guided their beliefs filtering of knowledge of policy-analysis. Second, policy maker choices on policy design and instruments as well as implementation successes and failures will change interest group resources and strategies. Thus, both the actors’ situational interpretation and the policy process feedback loop may be part of the explanation. In our paper, we will present the empirical development of the copyright subsystem to explain the on-going conflict in the copyright subsystem. First, we will apply a subsystem perspective to identify the relevant actors. Second, we will apply categories such as advocacy coalitions and beliefs systems from the ACF to analyse actor positions and conflicts. Third, insights of regime theory and the regulation literature will be used to analyses policy maker decisions. Copyright issues are continuously fought over in many countries and subsystems develop in many areas. At the same time, Germany is known for uploading policies and conflicts to the European level. In short, we are looking at a crucial case. Thus, to see “when effect becomes cause", we hope to distinguish the impact of technology and the effects of policy-making dynamics themselves.