Call for Papers: Copyright Harmonization in Europe

Copyright Harmonization in Europe: Re-configuring Knowledge, Labor, and Technological Production After 1989

This Sociology Lens special issue brings together interdisciplinary scholarship from sociology, political economy, media studies, and technology studies to examine copyright harmonization as a key mechanism in the formation of digital capitalism and as a historically situated reconfiguration of ownership, labor, and authority in Europe. It investigates how processes of legal harmonization and regulatory convergence have reconfigured ownership, labor, and technological production across Europe, with particular attention to post–Cold War transformations and peripheral contexts. Drawing on empirically grounded case studies, the issue explores how copyright harmonization reshapes center–periphery relations, transforms creative and software industries, and reorganizes the institutional geographies of the European digital economy.

Although copyright law has generated substantial legal and regulatory scholarship, copyright harmonization as a historical and sociological process remains less systematically examined, especially regarding its implications for ownership regimes, cultural production, and technological dependency in Europe. In this sense, the special issue treats copyright harmonization not merely as a technical legal change, but as a wider reorganization of social relations around property, knowledge, and cultural production in post–Cold War Europe. The issue is anchored in a double transformation that restructured post-socialist and peripheral European countries after 1989, from the late 1980s through the 2000s. The first involved the transition from socialism and state-centered developmentalism to market liberalization. During the 1980s and early 1990s, this shift was accompanied by the collapse and liquidation of domestic hardware industries in parts of former socialist and peripheral Europe, generating new dependencies on Western and East Asian capital, technologies, and supply chains.

The second transformation concerned the reorientation of national political economies toward European Union integration, which entailed the reconfiguration of intellectual property regimes, particularly those governing software and digital cultural production. As a result, forms of dependency increasingly shifted from material infrastructures such as hardware toward cultural and cognitive infrastructures, including software, licensing systems, and intellectual property frameworks. EU accession and alignment with the acquis communautaire required legal harmonization across multiple domains, with copyright regulation emerging as a central component. While harmonization enabled the technical and legal infrastructure of the single market, it also disciplined legal diversity and contributed to the consolidation of neoliberal property regimes across Europe’s peripheries.

This regionalization of copyright law carries significant cultural and ideological consequences yet remains an underexamined dimension of Europe’s post–Cold War transformation. At the same time, harmonization enabled new entrepreneurial trajectories and reconfigurations of cultural production networks, including pathways through which actors moved from informal or pirate economies toward formalized and internationally competitive creative industries. We are especially interested in historically grounded accounts of how these shifts were mediated by specific actors and institutions (policymakers, regulators, programmers, distributors, entrepreneurs, and intermediary organizations) operating across uneven European geographies. The special issue therefore invites empirically grounded contributions that examine how copyright harmonization has simultaneously constrained and enabled new configurations of knowledge, creativity, social relations, and cultural production. Positioned at the intersection of post–Cold War history, the legal and cultural history of European integration, and the historical development of digital capitalism, the issue aims to contribute to a broader sociology of digital labor, ownership, and technological inequality. While empirically centered on Europe, comparative perspectives and theoretical interventions extending beyond the region are welcome insofar as they illuminate the European experience, including its implications for contemporary platform governance, digital sovereignty and current copyright–AI debates.

Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:

• Copyright harmonization as historical political economy, including market-making processes, governance and enforcement regimes, and transformations of digital labor relations, valuation, and extraction.
• Center–periphery dynamics within Europe, examining how harmonization reshapes dependency, hierarchy, and technology transfer, as well as uneven integration into pan-European information, software, and creative markets.
• Shifts from hardware to software dependence, focusing on the structural move from material technological capacity toward cognitive and cultural infrastructures, and the institutional control of software production and distribution.
• Post–Cold War technological restructuring, including privatization, deindustrialization, and the reorganization of digital industries, as well as institutional trajectories from state-led production to marketized ecosystems.
• Informal and illicit digital economies and historical processes of legal normalization, including local and transnational piracy networks, pathways from informal distribution to formal markets, and the social organization of illegality, compliance, and enforcement.
• Cultural and creative practices emerging from unregulated or illicit media circulation, including their influence on digital subcultures, cultural events, artistic production, and the reconfiguration of post–Cold War digital divides.
• Biographical and collective trajectories of key actors, including programmers, distributors, entrepreneurs, and intermediaries involved in the recreation, adaptation, cracking, and redistribution of copyright-protected hardware and software.
• Creative industries and entrepreneurship under harmonization, including localization markets, game and software industries, intermediary actors, and the formation of new cultural production networks.
• Comparative perspectives, whether within Europe or in connection to other regions, including cross-national comparisons among post-socialist or peripheral contexts, or analyses linking Europe’s experience to global debates on digital capitalism.

Journal:

Sociology Lens is a peer-reviewed international journal published by Wiley dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible sociological research with clear theoretical and empirical contributions. The journal provides a platform for both established and emerging scholars, with a particular emphasis on work that engages broad sociological debates and reaches interdisciplinary audiences. Sociology Lens is indexed in major abstracting and citation databases, including the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) within Web of Science, and is also listed in Scopus. As an SSCI-indexed journal, it maintains rigorous double-blind peer review standards and contributes to internationally recognized impact metrics, making it a reputable venue for high-quality sociological scholarship.

Guest Editors:

• Ivo Furman, Istanbul Bilgi University (ivo.furman@bilgi.edu.tr)

• Maryja Supa, Vilnius University (maryja.supa@fsf.vu.lt)

• Gleb J. Albert, University of Lucerne (gleb.albert@unilu.ch)

• Alex Wade, Birmingham City University (alex.wade@bcu.ac.uk)

Keywords: Copyright Harmonization, Digital Capitalism, Post–Cold War Transformations, Historical Political Economy, Intellectual Property Regimes

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: “Is this submission for a special issue?” by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.

Abstracts should be 300–500 words, accompanied by a 100-word biographical note. Full papers should be 6,000–8,000 words, including references. All full papers will undergo double-blind peer review. Please note that acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee publication. Please send your abstract to all guest editors:

• Ivo Furman, Istanbul Bilgi University (ivo.furman@bilgi.edu.tr)
• Maryja Supa, Vilnius University (maryja.supa@fsf.vu.lt)
• Gleb J. Albert, University of Lucerne (gleb.albert@unilu.ch)
• Alex Wade, Birmingham City University (alex.wade@bcu.ac.uk)

Workplan

• Abstract deadline: 30 April, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 25 May, 2026
• Full paper deadline: 15 September 2026
• Special Issue Publication: February 2027