The Study On The Legal Protection Of The Merchandising Right Of Virtual Character

With the development of society and economy, associating with more and more virtual characters have been used in the commercial field, the Merchandising Right of virtual character are gradually coming into people’s view. However, this right is still a new right, so our country’s research on this right still remains at preliminary stage. This paper will start from analyze the concepts and properties of the Merchandising Right, combining with the definition of virtual characters to define the concepts and properties of the Merchandising Right of virtual character. Then the paper elaborates the legitimacy and necessity of the Merchandising Right of character through the analysis method of theoretical. Then we firstly describe and point out the shortcomings of our country’s status quo of the Merchandising Righ through copyright law, trademark law, and unfair competition law, summarize the Merchandising Right of foreign protection modes compared with America and Japan whose rights appear relatively early, and analyze the advantages between the centralized and decentralized protection mode. Combining the current economic environment and our country’s study of the Merchandising Right,we confirm that the future of China’s protection mode of the Merchandising Right is a transition from decentralized to centralized. At last this paper try to establish our own legal system of the Merchandising Right of virtual character through legal relationship and ort liability in order to provide some thinking for the future transition from decentralized to centralized protection mode.In this paper, with the definition of a virtual character, the concept and nature of the Merchandising Right of character is defined according to the concept and nature of the Merchandising Right. Then, theoretical analysis is applied to explain the legitimacy and necessity of the Merchandising Right of character. The status quo and shortcomings of the Merchandising Right of virtual character in our country is discussed and explored from the angle of Copyright Law,Trademark Law, Anti-Unfair Competition Law, etc. After the study of relevant laws of America and Japan, where the Merchandising Right has a relatively long development, a summary of the protection modes of the Merchandising Right is made through comparative analysis, and the pros and cons of decentralization mode and centralization mode are summarized and analyzed respectively. According to the current research level and market trend of our country, we come a conclusion that the protection mode of the Merchandising Right of our country should transform into centralization mode from decentralization mode in the future. Then, basing on the decentralization mode, this paper made a complement on the existing problem of the Merchandising Right, and finally tried to establish the fundamental of centralization mode of our country on the level of Legal Relationship and Tortious Liability, with a view to providing new ideas for the protection mode transformation of our country.