Study On Intellectual Property Legal Issues Of Fictional Character Merchandising

Fictional character merchandising, as a new production in modern social economic life, has followed sustained attention by the academic community with a controversial concept that we called merchandising right of virtual character since it appeared. In the last few years, with the improvement of cultural and creative industries, there are more and more cases about fictional character merchandising in our country, and a lot of issues of this kind left unsettled since the lack of correlative legislation and the lag of study work.So much more theories about the concept of fictional character reflects the divergence of the cognizance scope. Fictional character merchandising is far from real people merchandising. So that is a good way to treat it like a new intellectual property right when it does not involved in the case of the right of personality. From the global aspect, the legal protection for fictional character merchandising is multi-dimension and special. We all provide unacceptable protection by using traditional intellectual property law, and there always has the problem such as absence of protection of elements about fictional characters, inappropriate standards of tort compensation, overburden of right maintenance. To construct our fictional character merchandising protection systems, the balance of interests should be followed. The new right means that the fictional characters should be recognized and appeal customer, and the right includes right to use, the right to transfer, the right to license and the right to prohibit, and there are some limitations which are fair use, exhausion of the right and length of protection.