Research Of The Issue On The Copyrights Of Imitations

Imitating is an act that imitators make copies from imitations by virtue of their own capability and without any mechanical help. Also, imitating is an important means to learn painting and calligraphy, which enables calligraphic works and paintings to be known by more people and be handed down to generations. From different points of view, imitating has different classifications. The original works are the initiative ones while imitations are copied from them, so there are many differences between original works and imitations, which mainly refer to non-initiative and adherence, similarity with original works, relative independentability and demand. Today in the most parts of the world there are no clear copyright rules that formulate the concepts and criteria of originality, and so do in our country. Scholars in China and authorities of intellectual property hold the following opinions on the issue of the originality of copyrights of imitations: first,imitating means the simple replication; second, imitations entirely own originality;third, different types of imitations have originality in different extent. While the third one is the mainstream; but because of the lack of understanding and recognition of calligraphic works, this kind of view still has some certain defects on the determination of standards and definition of concepts. Therefore, imitators should strengthen the cognition and comprehension of calligraphic works and paintings, and profoundly understand cultural backgrounds of calligraphic works and paintings and the thoughts of authors. Originality is the most significant factor in the criteria of the copyrights of imitations, so when people analyze relative copyrights it they need foreign originality criteria as their references. The determination of originality standards remains a tendency of increasing improvement that orderly are Britain,America, France and German, which can be regarded as a standardized right-to-order chain of originality. According to comparison and analysis, the judgment of originality of imitations needs considering the subjective standards and objective standards. The subject of imitating must be a human being, so the subject should analyze from the essence of artistic works during the course of exploring copyrights of imitations; although the author has no participation in production, he should havethe copyright. But imitations with creative consciousness have greater odds of originality. If it is possible for imitations to own originality, they should have differences in the aspects of colors, lines, models and shading contrast of artistic works, which are obvious but not because of the low self-quality of the imitators. If there is no imitator’s thoughts, way of expressions and personality which lack of originality, the imitation has a very high similarity of original works and cannot be called as a piece of work. Moreover, the huge difference between imitations and the original work is led by the imitator with a low ability, so the basic creation requirement has not been achieved. Under such a condition, no matter how huge the difference is, it is not defined as a piece of work, let alone the copyrights. With a strong sense of originality, creative imitations always largely differ from original works by colors, distributions, lines and the choices of models, which posses the core condition of originality; and thus imitating is the distillation of the act of creation and creates a new piece of work. Actually, the style of creative imitations is like the adaption of works, so creative imitations are also protected by the copyright laws.Due to imitations’ particulrity, the protection of copyrights of imitations also has corresponding limitation of rights. The issue that whether imitations have copyrights only can depend on concrete analysis of concrete conditions and it is suitable to position creative imitations as adaption currently, which is based on the view that originality-centered principle integrates with basic aesthetic perspectives on artistic works.