The Research On The ISP's Copyright Infringement Responsibility

With the rapid development of the technology of the internet, the world has been in the information age. The internet has become the fourth media for people to get the information besides TV, radio and newspaper. The rich resources of the internet and the quickly spreading can bring convenient to the people's life, but it has also brought unprecedented challenges to the protection of the copyright owner's rights. The anonymity which is one of the internet's characteristics makes the tracking of the concrete infringement implementer just like Looking for a needle in a haystack. ISP connects the right owners and the users, so how to provide ISP's reasonable copyright infringement responsibility becomes the focus of the academics'research. ISP is the backbone of the development of the internet, our country's current legislation of the ISP's copyright infringement responsibility is still not perfect, which has brought troubles to the judicial practice. The ISP often escapes the copyright infringement responsibility with advocating the characteristics of the internet services, which makes network rights protection difficult. So our country's legal researchers must confront and resolve the problems which are how to balance the interests of all parts and how to provide some clear, reasonable and operational laws, regulations of the ISP's copyright infringement responsibility in the network era.This article will discuss the ISP's copyright infringement liability through three parts:The first part mainly adopts documentation analysis, classification induction. First of all, according to their technical characteristics I classify ISP into following types: the network infrastructure providers, Internet access providers (IAP), Internet content provider (ICP), Internet platform service providers (IPP) and information search service providers. Secondly, the basic types of Internet copyright infringement are analyzed, and then I will pay more attention to the classification of the common ISP and the characteristics of different ISP's behavior, and then summarize the relationship between ISP types and their responsibilities in the copyright infringement. In the end, I will point out that the theory of interests balance is the legal basis of the ISP liability limitation.The second part includes the second and the third chapters, which mainly adopts comparative analysis and case analysis. This part will compare and analyze the legislation status of ISP's copyright infringement responsibility of China, United States, the European Union and Germany. In the second chapter, firstly I listed the problems in current laws, administrative regulations and rules, judicial explanations, which provide ISP's copyright infringement liability. Then with typical cases, I will discuss the copyright infringement cases of IAP, ICP, IPP and hypertext links in detail, and then point out the defects of the relevant legislation. In the third chapter, as a reference to perfect our country's legislation, I will analyze the characteristics and the useful part of the ISP copyright infringement laws in the United States, Germany and the European Union. In the third part, I will put suggestions for perfecting the legislation of the ISP copyright infringement responsibility, mainly with experience conclusion and induces synthesis method. At first, on the basis of the above analysis, I appeal to formulate a kind of higher level law to regulate the ISP copyright infringement responsibility. I think that this law shall explicitly define the ISP's definition, classification, the legal status, imputation principles of different ISP's copyright infringement responsibility, and the compensation amount. Secondly, I will put forward that we shall construct the direct and indirect tort liability system, on the basis of Europe and America's legislation experience and the reality of our country. Finally I will put forward some thinking for regulating different ISP's reasonable notice obligations and liability recognized standard according to the characteristics of different ISP's infringement act.