Study On Private Copying In The Context Of Internet

With the development of internet, the ability of the private copying by the replication anddissemination has been improved unprecedentedly. The contradiction between private copyingand copyright holders is becoming ever more acute because some copyrighted works arespread wantonly on the Internet, which affects the economic interests of the copyright holders.Private copying belonged to the fair use before, but could it still be rightly classified as fair usein era of network? In respond to this issue, various countries restrict private copying to acertain degree through legislation and other measures, not only to ensure the public’sreasonable use of private copying, but also not unduly to cause excessive harm to the interestsof the copyright holders. However, the traditional approaches have many deficiencies andshortcomings, which can not solve the problem of private copying well under the environmentof Internet. Therefore it’s necessary to find new solutions.This paper is divided into three parts: the first part focuses on the basic theory of privatecopying in the context of Internet, including the concept of private copying, the new featuresof private copying, the definition of the private copying as well as the standards of fair use ofprivate copying in the context of Internet in order to introduce the subject of this article.The second part is mainly to introduce different countermeasures of internationalconvention and various countries on the issue of private copying. In addition to enactingappropriate legislations, many countries also design a series of supporting systems to deal withthe problem of private copying, such as compensation system originated in Germany, the thirdparty liability originated in the United States of America and other solutions like digital rightsmanagement and so on.The third part mainly discusses the ways to solve the private copying problem in thecontext of Internet in domestic. This section first describes domestic’s attitude towards theproblem of private copying and the reality of lacking relevant legislative norms. And thenpropose the solution to the private copying in the context of Internet in the current system. Theidea of this paper is to transform the fair use system, supplemented by the levy system, thedigital rights management and new business models to tackle the private copying issue in thecontext of Internet.