Cross-border copyright exploitation in the internet cultural industry: Copyright law and private international law in China and the UK

Part of the School of Law PhD Seminar Series

Tianwa Yang (Intellectual Property Law)

Abstract

Since the 19th century, the international community has endeavoured to promote the harmonisation of national copyright laws by a series of international conventions. However, these treaties only provided a minimum standard of copyright protection among the member states, not covering all aspects of copyright law and all countries in the world; thus, copyright law remains essentially national law. Part of the reasons might be that copyright law bases on the principle of territoriality so that national law would solve all disputes within the territory where foreign laws are excluded.

In the 20th century, the technology of digitalisation and Internet promotes the dissemination of knowledge in the globalised world but also unexpectedly brings numerous complicated legal issues when people could exploit or enjoy creative content just by clicking the mouse whenever and wherever they like. It becomes more complicated when the national country-by-country exploitation is replaced by the cross-border exploitation. It is no doubt that the international conventions have offered unified copyright rules to some extent that might eliminate some conflicts of national laws among different countries, yet substantive disputes such as the scope of moral rights and economic rights, transfer or license contract, copyright infringement do require the rules of private international law when jurisdiction and choice of law questions do arise.

This research will adopt a comparative approach in combination with the doctrinal analysis. By conducting a comparative study in the UK and China, it will figure out the substantive conflicts of copyright laws between the two countries, and further provide a suggestion on law reform of copyright law and choice of law for foreign-related civil relationships in China. Moreover, this research will adopt the doctrinal method, including the analysis of laws, regulations and cases in China and the UK.