On Legal Protection Of Copyright In Network Times

Under the guidance of scientific socialism, the author makes a historical and dialectical analysis of the openness and "power politics" thought embodied in international copyright protection convention and the western legislation, expounds the characteristics and deficiency of Chinese legal system regarding copyright protection and probes into the global question concerning network copyright protection. From the perspective of combining cultural and ideological progress with legal construction, the author transfers the study of copyright protection from the actual world to the fictitious network world, thus enriching and advancing Marxist theory about cultural and ideological progress and the theory about legal construction.Under network circumstances, the connotation of copyright has changed from "printing copyright" to "digital copyright". Digital copyright is characterized by integration of different work types, complexity of the ownership of copyright, vagueness of copyright protection standard and the peripheralization of the copyright owner's right, and all this poses a rigorous threat to copyright protection.The network serves as an important medium to disseminate spiritual civilization. Strengthening network copyright protection can meet the inherent requirement of cultural and ideological progress. Protecting the product of spiritual civilization can stimulate people's enthusiasm for spiritual civilization, promote the dissemination of modern science and culture, advance the healthy development of ideological ethics, including network ethics.Although there exist consistency and variability between copyright protection in network times and that in traditional printing times, copyright protection in both times share the same theoretical origin. Jurisprudence emphasizes much on the principle of "fairness and justice", which embodies itself as "interests balance" in copyright protection, that is, jurisprudence aims to solve interests clashes between the author and the general public. The ideological core of legal economics is "benefit". On the author's part, his monopoly of copyright compensates for the creating expenses; while on the society's part, all the consumers attain satisfactory returns by willingly paying for the goods and related service. Pluralism and universality are contradictory to each other in modern legal thoughts, and this contradiction constitutes the theoretical basis of legal system construction of copyright.The identity of the copyright subject (the author) is so complex, changeable and uncertain that protection of the author's personal right is challenged. However, the property right of the author under network circumstances has taken on new contents, and the analysis of the contents enables us to orientate our efforts more effectively towards network copyright protection.In network times, the expressing forms of works have greatly widened, while copyright protection falls far behind. For example, the copyright law in most countries has attached littleimportance to database and multimedia works, which are receiving increasing attention and gradually becoming the hard core of copyright industry. The author aims at arousing people's legal awareness by elaborating on copyright protection of database and multimedia works. However, the copyright holders' increasingly expanding rights will inevitably impede the dissemination of information and even infringe upon the interests of the general public unless certain restrictions are imposed. Therefore it is necessary for us to place restrictions on the copyright holders' rights, especially in the distance education and the digital library construction.The infringement of right appears in different forms in network times, and the infringement often accompany some specific network affairs, with copyright in electronic business affairs and network publication most severely infringed upon. Providers of network service, network contents and the users of network contents have performed illegal act and they should take relev...