Just like many other people who publish controversial content or strong peculiar opinions on the web, I experience derogatory or hateful ad hominem reactions from time to time. These comments mostly respond to innocuous statements, attempting to denounce my work on a perfunctory level, but are apparently targeted at my attitude on a greater scale and express general disagreement and rejection of my professional and policital positions. The comments cited below were presumably posted by one and the same person with different pseudonyms. I’m not going to take any further measures as that would mean to overrate the author’s pathetic misanthropy and vulgarism, but I nonetheless intend to raise awareness for those and similar cases. In the end, such backlash basically serves as confirmation of the impact of one’s public outreach, even where there is little coverage, and may encourage to keep up one’s efforts. #potatoesgonnapotate

As part of the pending copyright reform associated with the legal harmonisation of federal law to the EU guidelines, mostly referred to as the DSM directive, a number of changes will be applied to German legislation. I am generally positive towards most of the forthcoming amendments in copyright law, but there is one paragraph in the drafted bill that perplexes me: Collecting societies, such as the GEMA, will prospectively be allowed to make use of extended collective agreements, which means that they are entitled to exercise rights on behalf of non-member authors who have not granted their copyright management to the collecting society. This poses a problem if authors prefer to use CreativeCommons or other free licences (an integral component in the operational model of the C3S cooperative) or choose not to rely on copyright protection at all. In these cases, authors will have to actively opt out from the ›automatic‹ granting of their rights to a collecting society. Composers and arrangers do not seem to have reacted yet to this enhancement of the so-called GEMA presumption—or, in other words, to the reinforcement of the GEMA’s monopoly status as the only collecting society for musical works in Germany. I feel that this issue should at least be controversially discussed.

You know that something went definitely wrong when you advertise a 4-hour adjunct teaching assignment for minor subjects and get more than 20 applications from three countries, half of them from distinguished artists and scholars with PhDs or other merits. The fact that there are legions of qualified people striving for underpaid jobs at an advanced age is indicative of the system of higher education having developed to a desolate state. For university administrations as employers, it must be highly frustrating to witness their own graduates being subjected to an oversaturated academic job market—and all the more so in times of a pandemic. This system desperately needs to change.