What happens when copyright law meets memes, AI-generated images, and TikTok edits? That’s the question driving the formation of a new research network by Prof Dr Franziska Heller and Prof Dr Malte Stieper at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The network emerged from a series of 2024 workshops that brought together legal and media studies researchers, including CIPPM’s Dr Claudy Op den Kamp. Law and Media are fields that increasingly need each other yet rarely share a vocabulary. The new German pastiche provision (§ 51a UrhG), for instance, permits creative reworking, but nobody quite agrees where pastiche ends and quotation begins. Literature has settled conventions for quoting, but film and television do not. What counts as a citation in an age of supercuts and remix?

Six workshops are planned across the project. Host locations are Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the German Federal Film Archive Berlin, the German National Library Leipzig, the University of Cologne, and Bournemouth University.

The project will conclude with an international conference and an edited volume.