Research On The Legal Protection Of Folklore

The folklore, one of the important component part of traditional culture in a country, has made great contribution to the development of a multicultural society. During the international exchanges, folklore has been more and more important. Accompany with these changes, more and more countries and international organizations realize that it is necessary for them to protect folklore. So far, the attitudes towards the legal protection of folklore have not come to common in the international society, while our country is lacking for such legislation either. There are some urgent questions which are need to be answered, such as:what kind of legal model is suitable, how to design the institutionalization.By using of the comparative research method, the author begins this article with introduction to the meaning and characters of folklore, and further analyses the legal protection of folklore in the intellectual property domain.The article reviews international practices for protecting folklore in details:in the international level, the article introduces the connected work and relating treaties performed by World Intellectual Property Organization and some regional organizations. The article gets three main legal 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 folklore, the article ascertains the legal pattern of folklore as a special law under the system of intellectual property. Additionally, the author designs a special legislation to balance the interest between individual and public in order to protect folklore more efficiently. The article chooses this legal structure, and expects the breakthrough on the theory and on the legislation of the legal protection for folklore.The creative of this article is that it illustrates the status of legal protection of the folklore and it's drawbacks. Meanwhile, valuable suggestions have been put forward. It comes up with a constructive assumption of protecting the folklore. It includes the purpose of legal protection of the folklore, fundamental principles, the range of protection, subject of rights, object of rights, the term of the protection and the legal remedy.