Wenzel Goldbaum

Wenzel Goldbaum (born September 19, 1881 in Łódź , Russian Empire ; † May 15, 1960 in Lima , Peru ) was a lawyer , legal scholar and playwright . He influenced the development of German and international copyright law and is particularly regarded as the father of the doctrine of transfer of purpose .

Life

Wenzel Goldbaum came from a Jewish family whose name goes back to David Goldbaum, an inn owner from Grabow . During his childhood he moved with his parents, the doctor Adolf Goldbaum and his wife Bronislava Gruenfeld, from Łódź to Frankfurt am Main , where he attended the Lessing grammar school. He then studied law in Berlin and Munich, passed the state exams and received his doctorate in Marburg in 1906. In 1909 Goldbaum settled in Berlin as a lawyer and devoted himself primarily to copyright law . In the following period he also wrote dramas, three of which were performed by Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt . Goldbaum became secretary and syndic of the Association of German Stage Writers and Stage Composers , the Association of German Film Authors, and the Association of German Narrators and thus came into contact with legal questions of theater and film authors. He was also the syndic of the Felix Bloch heirs . During the First World War he was a soldier from 1914 to 1918. He was married to Marie Alexander-Katz, the daughter of the lawyer Paul Alexander-Katz. They had five children, including the director and film producer Peter Goldbaum .

Significant processes

In 1926 he won a lawsuit against Berlin and Leipzig radio stations for Gerhart Hauptmann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal before the Reichsgericht for the right to broadcast their works. In its judgment, the court followed a dissemination theory set up by Goldbaum.

Goldbaum represented the heirs of August Strindberg against Hyperion-Verlag in 1921 and won the case before the Reichsgericht on the basis of the legal aspects of copyright law.

He also had an influence on the development of copyright protection , so he fought for the rights to Èmile Zola's novel “ The Paradise of Ladies ” against the title “Women's Paradise” and the title of the play “ Alt-Heidelberg ” by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster against “Jung -Heidelberg “before the Supreme Court .

In the process of the three collecting societies GEMA , Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer (GDT) and AKU against the UFA , Goldbaum won a royalty to be paid by the cinemas to the film music composer , which was not included in the contract with the film producers.

emigration

Due to the increasing persecution of the Jews , Goldbaum left Berlin and Germany in 1933 and initially settled in Paris .

In 1936 he emigrated to Ecuador with his family . There he was a lecturer at universities in Quito and Guayaquil for several years and built on his reputation as an internationally known copyright lawyer. In 1946 Goldbaum represented Ecuador at the Pan American Copyright Conference in Washington .

Scientific work

See also : Purpose transfer theory # Purpose transfer theory by Goldbaum

Even before the First World War, Goldbaum had published several copyright monographs. After the war, further works and a textbook on copyright followed, including a commentary on copyright and copyright contract law that was first published in 1922 and which for the first time used the copyright term of transfer of purpose, which has been standardized in Germany since 1966 in Section 31 (5) of the Copyright Act .

In the 1920s he also dealt with fair trading law and vehemently advocated competition law related to the common good.

After his emigration and until his death, Goldbaum wrote numerous articles for legal journals, also in Spanish, which deal with international copyright law, among other things. Goldbaum became known through "Letters from Latin America", which appeared in the organ of the Bern Convention , "Droit d'auteur".

In 1956 there was a commentary on the 1952 Geneva International Copyright Agreement , which came into force in 1955 and which was supposed to establish the minimum protection for writers in foreign countries, but which Goldbaum described as completely inadequate.

In 1957 and 1959 the monographs “Creation or Achievement? Defense and attack ”and“ Decay and dissolution of the so-called Bern Union ”. The former opposes the ancillary copyrights of phonogram producers, performing artists, phonogram producers and broadcasters. These rights were necessarily at the expense of the author as the creator of the work. The Bern Union leads to a complication of international copyright protection.

Towards the end of his life, Goldbaum studied South American, especially Ecuadorian, poetry and translated it into German. In 1960 his translation of old Spanish poems by Juan Ruiz was published in Germany .

Awarded the Richard Strauss Medal by the German envoy in Ecuador in 1954

In 1954 Goldbaum received the Richard Strauss Medal from GEMA. He died on May 15, 1960 at the age of 78 in Lima , Peru .

Publications (selection)

Copyright monographs

• The performance contract (1912)
• The Performance Agency Contract (1912)
• Theater Law (1914)
• Actors' rights and obligations under applicable law (1914)
• Film publishing rights for mature books (1919)
• Copyright and Copyright Contract Law (1922, 3rd edition 1961)
• Creation or achievement? Defense and Attack (1957)
• Decay and dissolution of the so-called Bern Union (1959)

Dramas

• The Marriage Olympiads (1906)
• The election (1908)
• The Obstacle (1910)
• Mother (1913)
• Medicine (1914)
• The Empty Hands (1920)
• Zurich 1917 (1928)
• 1914 (1930)
• Dorothea educates the Germans (1945)

Poetry

• West and East (1898)
• Fruit bowl (anthology of Ecuadorian poetry, 1941, as translator and editor)
• Above the steppe the palm (volume of poetry, 1949, as translator and editor)

novel

• Slags (1921)
• In front of the ramp (1923)

literature

• Goldbaum, Wenceslaus. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 9: Glass Green. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-598-22689-6 , pp. 52-62.
• Erich Schulze: The publications of Wenzel Goldbaum . In: Archive for Copyright, Film, Radio and Theater Law (UFITA) , Vol. 31, 1960, pp. 375–384. [List of publications]
• Matthias Wießner, Simon Apel: Wenzel Goldbaum (1885-1960) . In: Simon Apel, Louis Pahlow , Matthias Wießner (eds.): Biographisches Handbuch des Intellectual Property , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, pp. 119–125.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wenzel Goldbaum in the catalog of the German National Library
• “Goldbaum, Wenzel” , in: Munzinger Personen Online, Internationales Biographisches Archiv.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Danny, Noemí and Dor Goldbaum: The history of the Goldbaum family , based on a summary of the family history by Heinz Goldbaum (1912–2005), Israel, 2005.
2. ^ Haimo Schack : Copyright and Copyright Contract Law . 8th edition. Mohr Siebeck, 2017, ISBN 978-3-16-155676-0 , Rn. 615 .
3. ^ Anton Plager: Protective purposes of the law of fairness. Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-60108-2 , p. 147.
4. ↑ Richard Strauss Medal for Dr. Wenzel Goldbaum . In: GEMA news . No. September 22 , 1954, p. 12 .
5. ↑ The play was premiered as a staged reading in December 1945 in the Kammerspiele in Quito , directed by Karl Löwenberg . “In four acts Goldbaum had developed his idea of ​​the pointlessness of wanting to educate the German people to democracy. As in the political debates, he expressed his thesis that the »other Germany« does not exist. ”(Maria-Luise Kreuter: Where is Ecuador? Exile in an unknown country 1938 to the end of the 1950s , Metropol, Berlin , 1975, ISBN 3-926893-27-3 , p. 258)