On The Punitive Damages System For Copyright Infringement

As a kind of intangible rights, the copyright is more vulnerable to infringement comparing with the traditional civil rights. There are many problems in the subsequent rights behavior. It's difficult to arbitrate the infringement and the loss. In order to solve the practical problems, it is necessary to build the Copyright Infringement System of Punitive Damages in the existing legal system. The paper starts with the historical evolution and connotation of the system, clarifies the civil liability attribute, and proposes four functions, including compensation, punishment, warning and incentives, that should be included in the system. By referencing the outside experiences, the paper provides reference basis for our country to build this system by comparing the arguments between the Anglo-American law systems and the continental law system. Considering the domestic legal system foundation and the social foundation, the paper tries to analyze the conditions to build up this system.Recently, the Copyright Law Amendment (Draft) has been released. Nevertheless, a lot of deficiencies, especially the provisions on punitive damages, still exist in this amendment. First, it doesn't distinguish the compensation by the seriousness of the infringement, ignoring the proportionality between the result and the behavior. Second, one severe infringement behavior is left out of punishment according to the rule of twice and it does not make a clear explanation of twice,leaving the gap to the infringer. Third, the standard and the times of the compensation needs to be tested. The following methods are put forward to solve above problems in this paper: (1)Determine the more stringent standards to punishment the "malicious tort" than the"intentional tort".(2) Incorporate "one serious infringement",which should be given a precise definition, to the punitive damages system.(3) Consider whether the compensation result has made up for the infringed or not, and keep the balance between the infringer and the infringed to avoid the excessive litigation.