Inquiring Into The Copyright Of The Network Distance Education

With the rapid development of the digital technology, especially the advent of the internet, the distance education has come into our life, which is absolutely a transform towards traditional learning methods. The network curriculum is the main core of the distance education. In order to promote the development of the distance education, the copyright system is supposed to taking an important role. The copyright system has received the intense impact of the technology advancement. The new technological innovation has broken the balance of original copyright owner and the social public in the resource distribution, which causes original copyright system can not be suitable to the network environment with difficulty appropriate. The distance education, as the digital technology application product, has also met the similar problem.There are four parts of this article, the first part introduced the definition, origin and development of the distance education, analyzed the quality of the network curriculum, and emphasized the network curriculum’s copyright protection. The network curriculum totally complies with a standard of the "work" in our copyright law, and it consists of model curriculum and database, so it is not that giving the protection to the network curriculum only according to the copyright law, but also refers to the European database directive and the national regulation about the "compilation of works".The second part of this article discussed the copyright ownership of the network curriculum. America advanced in the distance education, the "works for hire" principle, the intellectual property contract and the copyright policy are the three common practices in solving the problem of copyright ownership in America. In our country, we referred to the regulation about "Employee works","cooperative works" and "Commissioned works" to deal with this problem. The "benefits equilibrium" Principle in the law aims to balance the author’s exclusive interests and the public’s interests. While the traditional copyright system provides protections to the authors, it also keeps the balance of private protection and the public welfare by limiting the rights of authors. Education, as an important aspect of the social science and culture, must enjoy all the civilized achievements whatever in the "face to face" class or the internet class. Therefore, this part also analyzed problem of copyright limitation, including the origin and definition of the fair use system,"three-step test" principle,"four elements" principle and the statutory license.The third part mainly introduced the related international convention and some other countries’law on education, and emphasized the TEACH act in America, which shows detail legislation about fair use in the distance education. The TEACH act can benefit our country’s legislation.The last part of this article put the emphasis on the legislation of distance education in our country. With the rapid development of our distance education, the lack of law in distance education probably impedes its development. Accordingly, it is urgent to perfect the copyright law in distance education. This article elaborated the fair use, the statutory license, the right of information network dissemination and the collective management of copyright, giving some suggestion on legislation with the aim to perfect our copyright protection in the distance education.