„Film ab“

Abstract

With the implementation of digital technologies in the movie industry, the established relations of distribution and consumption were partly undermined by peer-to-peer-filesharingnetworks and the private use of CD- and DVD-burners. This process was accompanied by heavy protests and campaigns of the movie industry labelling “movie piracy” as a serious crime. Drawing on the framework of materialist state theories, this article examines the struggles in the legal re-regulation of the German Urheberrecht concerning the accepted use of digital technologies for private use in the process of movie distribution and consumption (forms of intervention), and the institutional selective access of social forces to the political decision process’ in the state apparatus’ (forms of representation). Secondly, this article is concerned with the struggles in the German civil society that are centred around the initiation of a new hegemonic world-view consisting of the acceptance of the industry’s private property rights on digitalised movies: the included the different threat and surveillance strategies pursued by the movie industry and the different forms of protest and resistance against it.