Study On Infringement Liabilities Of Cinematographic Works

Lenin said, "As for us, among all the art patterns, the most important is the movie.' Over a hundred years saw the development of the movie, which has deeply affected human's behavioral and life styles. The movie is not only the form of entertainment, but also the way of cultural transmission. The movie is an integrated art developed on the base of science and technology. The advancement in science and technology provides more creative techniques as well as more channels for movie transmission, attracting more audiences and posing more challenges to the development of the movie.Technology is a two edged sword as well in the field of movies. On the one hand, technology is the foundation for the existence and development of the movie, and a step forward means more room for movie development. On the other hand, technology is also advanced tools for infringement as for movie copyright. Such infringement hinders the development of the movie. The history of movie development is also the history of war against movie infringement. At first, as to the film movie, because of the limitation of technology; movie infringement was limited to unauthorized screening in the public places except the cinema. Therefore, it was easy for copyright holders to protect their rights. Then, it came to the disc movie, which developed with the spreading of disc players and the improvement of recording equipment technology. In the blink of an eye, pirated discs are available to every household. Technology brought great losses to copyright holders and exposed them to great difficulty in protecting their rights. At present, the digital movie is a new movie pattern developing from IT, digital technology and communications technology. Information highway facilitates the illegal copying, recording, transmitting of cinematographic works, which are subject to unprecedented infringement. Hence, how to protect digital movie copyrights in the new times is inevitable and important contents in laws of different countries. However, because the cinematographic works are a comprehensive expression art, the movie has unique attributes which other art forms never possess, and such attributes pose more difficulty in law making and application. For long, little attention has been paid to protection as to movie copyrights and this leads to poor research in this field. As a result, such situations will affect the quality of law making and law enforcement. Emphasis should be placed on movie copyright research, which is of importance to theory and practice.On the base of the research findings as to the relative issues at home and abroad, the paper expounds on the liability of movie copyright infringement in four parts, adopting many ways such as induction, deduction and comparison.Part one analyses general issues as to cinematographic works. Starting from the concept of cinematographic works, the paper expounds on cinematographic works and the particularity of legal relationships as to cinematographic works copyrights.Part two detailedly expounds on infringement of cinematographic works copyrights from the concept, characteristics, liability principles, constitution elements, types, and defenses. With regard to the liability principles of cinematographic works copyright infringement, different liability principles apply to different cases in view of the claim of cessation of infringements or damages.Part three expounds on the remedies to types of cinematographic works copyrights infringement and defenses. The types are different according to different standards. In view of the more complicated infringement of cinematographic works copyrights in the age of information, the paper expounds on the indirect liability as to the protection of cinematographic works copyrights. With regard to defenses, fair uses, licensing, and expiration of copyrights are discussed respectively.Part four expounds on legal remedies to cinematographic works copyrights infringements. Combined with actual situations in China, the paper put forward legislative proposals as to cinematographic works copyrights protection in China from the perspective of civil law, criminal law and administrative law. This part mainly center on remedies in terms of civil law and put forward legislative proposals as to third party liability, moral distress damages and punitive damages.