Preliminary Investigation On Rights Of The Art Reproduction

With the gradual establishment of formation art trading market in recent years, the number of traded arts surged, the amount of money involved is ever increasing. Art investment has attracted many's attention and become their focus. It can be said that art trading is becoming third largest investment economy aside from real estate and stocks.At the same time, art-related judicial cases have also increased. The absence of relevant laws and regulations or ambiguous phenomenon has become increasingly evident, resulting in embarrassing situations that judicial practices often encounter cases with no laws, no reference to refer to. More and more legal practice has brought greater implementation difficulties to relevant judicial and legal practitioners. We call for the better laws and regulations as soon as possible, and a separate legislation of law without delay.The embodiment of art's value maintenance and appreciation, in addition to it appealing to public, the property ownership is also being highly regarded. A deeper level of exploration is the distinction between the value of an art with a carrier (ownership) and the value of carrier-free non-material rights (copyright). We recognize that when trading art in the market, in addition to the art object itself, there is also an intangible right to the art commodity. The intangible right, so called"Copyright", which can be exchanged as commodity, is what will be discussed in this article. Because the copyright and reproduction right are so relevant to each other, and because the origination of copyright is to protect the right to reproduce, so this article will discuss in particular the rights of reproduction among copy rights. The legal issues encountered by some judicial practitioners will also be discussed in the hope of bring more attention to these issues of concern.In this paper, some general principles of Jurisprudence and Civil Law were cited. The first part of this article gives some basic knowledge on copy right protection. I also gave some simple examples of domestic and international copy right protection development history and local law protection. The second part discussed the subject, object, and contents of the the art reproduction, analyzed all major factors of the right of reproduction, the transfer of copy right, restrictions on the use, protection method, legal liability and other points of law. In the third part, a large number of examples of judicial cases were given, covering areas of painting, sculpture, architecture, and photographic image reproduction art market. Examples were also given for drawing and photography reproduction rights protection, concerning a number of issues and phenomena. For paintings: to protect the right of reproduction time limit, a copy of authorized collection of cultural relics, right of reproduction for modified work, the conflict of copy rights and authorship , the right of reinstatement and the compilation of the conflict, the definition of original works of art. For sculpture: no rules on version numbers, authentic and fake licensees; if different latitudes copy is considered reproduction; ambiguity of city sculpture's ownership , abuse of power, and so on. The fourth part of this article is the summary and conclusion on China's copy right protection. Some recommendations to speed up the legislature of relevant laws are proposed.