A Comparative Study On The Legal Protection Of Technological Measures In Digital Age

The development of digital technology makes the humanbeing enter the digital age. In the digital age, the technology and the internet have facilitated the infringement of digital works, which poses great challenge to the traditional approach of copyright protection. Copyright owners thus have employed technological measures to protect their works in the digital world. However, the development of digital technology knows no measure, these technological measures are threatened by the circumvention technology which makes them useless. The increasing circumvention activities cause copyright owners to seek legal protection of their technological measures. Within this context, the treaties adopted by WIPO stipulated that the contracting parties had the obligation to make domestic laws to protect the technological measures. In order to perform the obligation, many contracting parties have promulgated the relating provisions based on their own situations, which can be considered as three types of legal models, such as over-stricted model, stricted model and non-stricted model. However, since the beginning, such legislation has received continuous critiques.One of them is that to provide legal protection to technological measures will eliminate copyright fair use and thus break the balance between copyright owners and the public. To preserve fair use, different countries have made various efforts in their technological measures protection laws. Futhermore, the misuse of the technological measures conducted by the copyright owners has become a new issue in recent years. In order to restrict the misuse behaviors, many countries have taken some measures within the copyright law system. This article conducts a comparative study of the domestic laws and juridical practices of four countries, aiming to provide useful suggestions for the improvement of the technological measures protection law in China.This article has five chapters with a total number of 43,000 words.The first chapter summarizes the legal protection of technological measures in digital age. At the beginning of this chapter, the author introduces the characteristic of digital age, then finds out the reason of the copyright owner to use the technological measures, and tells the readers what the technological measures are and the necessity to give them legal protection in digital age.The second chapter conducts a comparative study of the international legislations, introduces the ambiguous provisons from WIPO, the over-stricted model from EU, the stricted model from the United States, and the non-stricted model from Australia and Japan.The third chapter explains the important role of the fair use doctrine firstly, then cites the cases to discuss the impacts on the fair use doctrine made by the protection of technological measures, and makes a comparative study on the measures taken by diffierent models to deal with the impacts.The fourth chapter is about the misuse of technological measures and the method to restrict them within the copyright law system. This chapter cites the cases happened in the United States and France, and then discusses the different measures taken by the two countries to deal with the misuse behaviors conducted by copyright owners.The last chapter introduces the development of legal protection of technological measures in China, points out the weakness of the effective legislation and provides some suggestions for its improvement.