I like Germany, and I like living here. I think my country is an awesome place. That being said, there are some definite downsides to living here, and a major issue is how various powerful organizations run the German media landscape - and in general they hate and fear change, especially anything that forces them to change their way of operations (such as the rise of the Internet).
Let's start with public radio and television. I think they serve a useful purpose, and I enjoy listening to some comedy shows on my local public radio stations. However, for some obscure legal reason German public radio and television stations may not be funded via taxes, but by fees which are mandatory for everyone who owns a radio or a television capable of receiving them. To collect them, the public broadcasters (and the states of Germany which run them) created a bureaucratic monstrosity called the "Gebühreneinzugszentrale der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" or GEZ for short to collect their fees - which are almost universally called "GEZ fees" even though the GEZ has filed numerous lawsuits so that they are referred to as "broadcasting fees" instead.
This organization wrote stern letters to every household in Germany telling them to register their radios and televisions, or else. I did register my radio and thus had to pay a fee of €5.76 per month, since I had one and made use of it, but I've never owned a television so I didn't register one. This did not keep the stern letters at bay - instead, they sent me one every three months telling me that I Must! Register! Any Television Sets! IMMEDIATELY! and pay the associated fee of €17.98 per month. The number of trees which died for those letters must be truly staggering. And the GEZ hired numerous people to spy after citizens who didn't register all their devices, which often involved getting into their houses or apartments under false pretenses - they were not police, so people weren't obligated to let them in - but if they were dumb enough to do that anyway and the informants saw evidence of a television or radio that weren't registered, they were sure to be sued over this.
And a few years back the public broadcasters also started using the Internet to broadcast their shows... so the GEZ claimed that having Internet access alone was sufficient grounds for having to pay both radio and television fees. It didn't matter whether anyone actually used the Internet for that - all that mattered was that they could.
At the start of the year, the GEZ was organized into the "ARD ZDF Deutschlandradio Beitragsservice" and they now assume that everyone has Internet - so every apartment or household has to pay €17.98 per month. Organizations (including public ones, such as local governments) and companies now have to pay fees based on the numbers of branch offices and the number of people working at each of the branch offices - which has caused the costs for city governments to soar, leading to a number of lawsuits and even city governments refusing to pay them at all. This year is certainly going to be interesting...
The sensible thing - i.e. the cheapest way of financing the public broadcasters - would be to just pay them via taxes. But the federal government is in charge of setting the levels for most taxes while the states of Germany are in charge of public broadcasting, so this uneasy situation will likely continue...
The next major obstacle to consuming media like in the rest of the Western World is the "Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte" or GEMA for short. This organization has had its origin at the start of the 20th century when artists, writers and other creative folks wanted some financial compensation whenever one of their works was used in public productions (and later broadcasting) - not an unreasonable demand. However, during the Weimar Republic there were two competing organizations each claiming to represent artists until in late 1933 the Nazis merged them into the Staatlich genehmigten Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Aufführungsrechte (STAGMA) to represent all German artists (excluding Jews, of course, since "non-Arians should not be seen as suitable guardians and producers of German culture").
In 1947 the organization was renamed into GEMA, but its mission continues - they collect fees from all public broadcasts involving artists or companies which have rights to the content in Germany and distribute them among performers and artists according to some complex and dubious formulas. This worked badly enough for several decades - until the Internet arrived and provided a whole new platform to public broadcasts. The attitude of GEMA towards the Internet was shaped by a conservative politician named Reinhold Kreile who ran the organization from 1990 until 2005 and who called it a "lighthouse of culture" and a "rock withstanding the wave of digitalization" which prevented "unnecessary competition". And to him, the Internet was "nothing more than a virtual department store" which needed to be controlled "with a hostile takeover".
In other words, their attitude was that since the Internet was public, any media consumed via the Internet counted as a "public broadcast" - and the website that offered this media had to pay them fees, often resulting in lawsuits if the owner of the website refused to comply. The most famous target of their ire was YouTube, which not only had numerous clips with specific musical tracks or shows but remixes of those - including fan creations where music created by various artists were used for fan-created clips.
The GEMA is constantly firing cease-and-desist demands to YouTube to take down those videos until they come to an agreement over the fees - and various German courts have supported GEMA so far. YouTube has offered a percentage of their ad revenues from relevant videos... but GEMA refuses to accept anything other than a flat payment, similar to how they handle other public broadcasts. Their conflict goes on, and until a solution is found when someone in Germany wants to watch a video with a contested song - such as PSY's "Gangnam Style", the top-rated YouTube video of them all - YouTube simply displays the following:
This affects more than 60% of YouTube's 1000 most popular videos. And just recently, GEMA has filed a cease-and-desist order against YouTube for displaying this, as they believe that this will make people think that this is all GEMA's fault.
These two are hardly isolated incidents - other large German media organizations hold similar attitudes. For example, German news corporations are lobbying our politicians to make Google pay them for displaying links to their news websites, which is sort of like cutting off your nose to spite your face. And German media companies who own the rights to movies and television shows are hardly better. The United States have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon's video-on-demand and much more - but their German equivalents are terrified of any change and thus no equivalent services exist. I would love to be able to pay for and legally download all my favorite English-language shows, but the best I can do is to wait until the DVDs are released (if ever) - which take up yet more space in my apartment and make a mockery of the digital revolution. The same goes for digital books - while the number of English-language ebooks available in Germany is slowly increasing, too many German companies who own the rights for these books in Germany refuse to make them available.
To sum it up, while living in Germany has a lot of things going for it, it's not the best place for passionate media consumers.
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