Research On Legal Issues Of Protecting Folklore

As an important part of national culture assets, folklore has been received lots of attention since 1950. More and more countries and international organizations realize that it is necessary for them to protect folklore. But there is no complete international pattern for the protection.In our country, both legislative authority and theoretical circle have not focused on this subject for a long time, so that the research issues of legislation and theory are not advanced. There are many questions which need legislative answers, such as: what is the proper legislation pattern, how to design the system. There are also some disagreements in the theoretical circle, such as: what kind of objects should be protected; what are the differences between works and expressions.The thesis, at the beginning, gives the conception of folklore by comparing folklore with some other relating conceptions, demonstrates the protection scope of folklore by sampling four types of it, and summerizes the characteristics of folklore: community, region, inheritance, and variation.With the study on the original promotion of human society and the analysis on common characters of IP objects, the thesis proves the nessity and possibility of legal protection. And on the view of legal philosophy and legal economy, the thesis discovers that the theory of "balance of interest" is useful for the legal protection. Meanwhile, the thesis emphasizes that legal protection of folklore is significant for the developing countries.The thesis reviews international practices for protecting folklore in details: In the international level, the paper introduces the connected work and relating treaties performed by World Intellectual Property Organization and three main regional organizations, and gets three legislation patterns of many countries for protecting folklore: special law, copyright law and cultural heritage law.Subsequent to the fact in our country that there are little provisions of public law and absolute blank of private law for the folklore, the thesis ascertains the legislation pattern of folklore as a special law under the system of copyright law. In the end, the writer designs a special regulation to balance the interest between individual and public in order to protect folklore more efficiently. The thesis chooses this legislation structure, and expects the breakthrough on the theory and legislation of the legal protection for folklore...