Legal Issues Of Copyright Transactions

Copyright transactions refer to all or part of the economic rights onthe works. The copyright owners obtain the corresponding economicincome through copyright licensing, transfer, pledge, investment, etc. Thisarticle aims to discuss the legal issues of copyright transaction, whichcontians two aspects: the varieties legal relations involved in copyrighttransactions; the varieties legal risks exist in copyright transactions.In this paper, we introduces some related concepts of copyrighttransactions first. Then we give some analysis in four aspects: the subject,the content, the form and the price of the copyright transactions. Wesummary previous research results and give some new conclusions too.(1) Using the knowledge of economics, we classify the copyrightmarket into four common trading patterns: competitive seller’s market,competitive buyer’s market, monopoly seller’s market, monopoly buyer’smarket. All of them need a famous seller or buyer, then the other litigantcan find them. It’s bad for transactions between two unknown litigants. Inthis case, we need the Internet. The copyright transaction on the Internet isup-and-coming.(2) The most important part of the subject of copyright transactions iscopyright owner.“Trade with who?” is the first and most importantproblem in copyright transactions. Most of the time, we can answer thisquestion by verified”Who is the author”. But there are some exceptionscase too.(3) The content of copyright transactions is the economic rights,which are not unlimited. We also give some discuss on this topic. We findthat if the term of protection will be end soon, then the value of copyrightwill be approaching to zero. We also find that fair use and statutorycopyright license will affect the value of copyright.(4) The form of copyright transactions which we discussing in thispaper contain: service work, commissioned work, copyright licensing,copyright transfer, copyright mortgage and copyright contribution, etc. Through analysis in Chapter Four, we assert that all of them are copyrighttransactions, except copyright mortgage. Since the aim of litigants incopyright pledge isn’t copyright transactions.(5) The price of copyright transactions is the issue which weconcerned at the beginning of our research, but it’s very difficult. We willsome further studies in the future.