The Intellectual Property Protection For Fictional Character

Fictional character is also called as art image of works. It usually refers to the character, animal and cartoon image which is created in literature, film, animation and other works. As far as works is concerned, fictional character is an edge question. In recent years, with the rapid development of entertainment culture industry, fictional character gradually reflects the commercial value which it have contained. At the same time, along with the process of commercial development, infringement cases of the fictional character continue to happen.Fictional character can not produce commercial value itself, and only those who have a certain social influence and public attraction appeal to contain a potential commercial value. Because of those, those fictional characters have become the object, which the merchant try their best to use and develop. However, in practice, the improper use of the fictional character has caused a serious confusion in the market and broke the balance of interests between the fictional character owner and users. So that, the owner rights will be violated while the businessmen use the fictional character illegally.The secondary development of fictional character is called as fictional character's merchandising. In the process of merchandising, it's producing a new type of right that is named as merchandising right. It is different from the tradition intellectual property right and our intellectual property system can't cover all of it. So, this makes our intellectual property system have a limitation in protecting fictional character.How to solve the shortcoming of legal protection in fictional character will become a new problem we faced in future. This paper is based on the reference of foreign protection mode and then put forward improvement of the copyright law, trademark law and anti-unfair competition law way to solve this problem through analysis of the intellectual property protection. This thesis is divided into six parts: Part one:Introduction. This part mainly quotes a real case and makes a brief analysis of the legal problems caused by it, then lead to the theme of the paper.Part two:The basic problems of the fictional character. This part mainly analysis the basic problem of the fictional character such as the concept, the types, and the components. And then provide a theoretical base for the fictional character in pursuing protection from intellectual property rights.Part three:The foreign intellectual property protection for the fictional character. This part mainly introduces the foreign protection status of the fictional character, and then provides a theoretical and practical experience for China.Part four:the status and limitations of the intellectual property protection for fictional character in China. This part mainly discusses the limitations in the current intellectual property system for protecting fictional character, and then raises the necessity for protecting fictional character form our law system.Part five:Improvement of intellectual property protection system on the fictional character. This part will put the fictional character merchandising right into the current intellectual property system, and then improvement of the copyright law, trademark law and anti-unfair competition law will compensate for the shortages of the tradition law in protecting fictional character.Part six:Conclusion. This part presents that the fictional character infringement cases will raise with the people pursuing more spiritual cultural products.So, we need to build and improve the legal system to protect fictional character.