Germany is a signatory of the Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms of October 29, 1971, the Geneva Phonograms Convention, as is the USA.
The German Federal Court of Justice decided a penal law case on that treaty on March 3rd (press release in German).
A company had reproduced 268.090 CDs without a license and exported them to Bulgaria. The managing director (Geschaeftsfuehrer) of that company was sentenced (suspended) to one year and three months of prison.
The Federal Court of Justice affirmed that sentence and decided that German copyright law protects American music publishers against this kind of piracy under the Phonogram Convention. Article 2 of that Convention reads:
Each Contracting State shall protect producers of phonograms who are nationals of other Contracting States against the making of duplicates without the consent of the producer and against the importation of such duplicates, provided that any such making or importation is for the purpose of distribution to the public, and against the distribution of such duplicates to the public.
The offense was not only one of duplicating without consent, but also one of distributing to the public. The court held for the first time for copyright violations that sending pirated copies to a third country is illegal distribution to the public in Germany, not only in the target country (Bulgaria in this case).
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 7, 2004 07:00 PM | TrackBack