The Conflict And Coordination Between Digital Rights Management And Fair Use In Copyright Law

Development of digital technology promotes the revision of the copyright law continually. Digital Rights Management(abbr. DRM)is the most direct instrument to protect the copyright owners' rights. At the same time, the circumvention devices and services emerge, in order to encourage copyright owners to digitalize their works and transmit them on the network, many countries provide protection for the DRM applied by the owners of the works. Some critics point out that the DRM may conflict with traditional copyright law in that they erode fair use, which will destroy the balance of the benefits maintained by copyright law. In fact, DRM has made an unprecedented challenge to the fair use system. The solution of this problem concerns that in which kind of a legal situation that DRM will develop and how to keep copyright's traditional balance between the copyright owners' benefits and the public benefits.In this paper, we will pay attention to connected problems as follows: what is the external appearance, intrinsic reasons and negative effects of the conflict between DRM and fair use? what kind of theory is the foundation the coordination, and where is the way of the correlation coordination? at present, how do our country make law to deal with the conflicts?Regarding the first question,scholar generally research it from the angle of DRM's function. In this foundation, the thesis analyzed the DRM's theory system,the necessity of the DRM's legal protection, the benefit demand of various participant in DRM's value chain,compared with the difference of DRM's anti-circurnvention rules and the typical case in the developed country and summarized the conflict external appearance. The thesis stressed that DRM has erode the fair use system from technology and legal two aspects. Moreover, the thesis thought the intrinsic reason of the conflict comes from the digital technology development, the copyright law's dual goal and the developed country initiative behavior, and then the thesis analyzed negative effects of the conflicts.About the second question,the thesis thought the revision of copyright law cannot neglect technical, social and the legal factor effected the benefit balance of copyright. DRM is important self-service means to protect the interests of copyright owners in digital era. Although, DRM's anti-circurnvention rule and fair use all have theirs rationality, but the copyrighter's rights endowed by DRM's anti-circurnvention rules surpass to the traditional copyright, which departed from benefit balanced spirit of the fair use. Therefore, coordination between DRM and fair use have to establish on the basis of the principle of benefit balance. According to this theory, the thesis proposed several constructive ways. It mainly includes: guiding DRM's value orientation by the copyright law, establishing reasonable legislation procedure of DRM, establishing reasonable application mechanism of the fair use, revising dynamically the fair use system, levying the special expense and using collective management of copyright and so on.About the last question, the article point out that when formulate law to coordinate the conflicts, we must consider many important factors in china, such as DRM's technology and the application level, the situation of copyright protection, the development of economy and technology and so on. After making use of the success experiences of the developed country, the article proposed some methods for revising our correlative laws.