| Literary character is an artistic image with a distinctive personality that the author fictionalizes in literary works through language.A complete literary character is a complex composed of various elements such as appearance characteristics,internal character characteristics,language and behavior characteristics.With the prosperity of online literature,the rise of fan culture and the arrival of the era of full copyright operation,there are many ways to use literary characters for re-creation.At present,the legal status of literary characters is still unclear,which not only allows opportunists to take advantage of it,but also makes creators of the characters seem at a loss when defending rights.The issue of copyright protection of literary characters needs to be resolved urgently.This paper is divided into three parts to study the copyright protection of literary characters.The first part analyzes the practical necessity of literary character copyright protection from three aspects: the value of literary characters themselves,the increase of related copyright dispute cases and the lack of other legal protection,and then finds the obstacles to literary character copyright protection from the legislative and judicial levels: the status of Copyright Law is ambiguous,the lack of a clear and uniform standard for determining copyright,and the lack of a well-established standard for infringement determination and compensation standards.The second part is the copyright analysis of the character of literature.First,from the legal point of view,demonstrate the legitimacy of literary character copyright protection,then analyze the current determination of the scope of protection of works and the problems existing in the standards of work composition requirements,immediately following the legislative purpose of the Copyright Law and the reality of the development of the cultural industry,it is necessary to propose solutions to the aforementioned problems,and on this basis,it is determined that the character of literature can constitute original expression.In addition,due to the special nature of literary character as an integral part of the original work,it must be independent to be independently protected by Copyright Law,from the inspiration of foreign protection experience,it is found that literary characters can satisfy the requirements of completeness,distinctive recognition and predictability,as well as the ability to be "extracted" and "fixed" to have the independence of the work.The third part puts forward specific suggestions for improving copyright protection of literary characters.Under the existing Copyright Law System,adopting a narrow sense of copyright protection model can better meet the needs of the full-copyright development and operation of literary characters than the neighboring rights protection model.It is a convenient way to protect literary characters into the object type of "literary works" through reasonable expansion of interpretation.It is also necessary to unify the application of copyright protection standards for literary character in the judiciary,and to standardize and perfect the character infringement determination according to the particularity of literary character.Finally,in order to avoid the excessive rights of the copyright holders of the literary characters,and balance the interests of the relevant subjects of literary characters,this paper puts forward feasible suggestions on the setting of the protection period and the optimization of the Fair Use System. |
