On The Determination Of The Tort Of The Right To Protection Of The Integrity Of Works In Film And Television Adaptations

The difference in the judgment standards of the two levels of courts in the case of "nine-story monster tower" on the infringement of the right to protect the integrity of works has attracted the attention of both theoretical and practical circles.Due to the vagueness and abstractness of the legal provisions of our country,the tort determination standard for protecting the right to integrity of works is in the light of benevolence and wisdom.At present,there exist two kinds of tort determination standards in theory and practice concerning the protection of the right to integrity of works.These two standards have their own advantages and disadvantages,but neither involves the balance of private interests and public interests.They do not examine the subjective intention of exploiting works and ignore the inherent logical link between the right to adaptation and the right to protect the integrity of works.Therefore,it is necessary to construct a tort determination standard system with balance of interests,distinction and unity of subjectivity and objectivity.Firstly,the right boundary of the right to integrity of works is clarified based on the theory of balance of interests.The text of the work is the carrier of the author’s thoughts and feelings.Compare the adapted work with the thoughts and feelings contained in the original work,and observe whether the altered part of the original work destroys the identity of the work.On the one hand,the object reputation of personality right protection is eliminated and the object works of copyright protection are returned.On the other hand,the decision should be based on the text of the work,which not only helps to ensure that the original author controls the work and respects the expression of the author,but also takes into account the interests of the community and provides boundaries for its exercise.Secondly,when determining the infringement of the right to integrity of a work,it is necessary to consider whether the aggressor has a distinct subjective state.Under the current legal system of our country,there is little discussion on the subjective state of the infringer in the existing research on the infringement judgment of the right to protect the integrity of the work,and the common practice in court cases is almost to acquiesce in the intention of the author to alter the work.However,in the infringement cases of the right to integrity of works,it is very difficult to make subjective determination of infringers,especially after paying reasonable consideration,and it is very difficult to find that the author has tortious intent in adapting the works with the permission of the author.In the case of the nine-storey monster tower,the court did not give theoretical evidence in the decision as to whether the adaptation of the work by the explorer had the subjective intention of impairing the right to integrity of the work.Compared with other intellectual property rights,copyright has the dual attributes of personal rights and property rights.When the infringement of the right to protect the integrity of a work is determined,a distinction should be made between the authorized and unauthorized status of the ownership of the work and the ownership of the work,and the subjective status should be adjusted and differentiated.When the personal and property rights of a work belong to different subjects of rights,the transferor and the transferee usually have a licensing contract.If the transferee wants to protect the integrity of the work,it can claim that the transferee’s adaptation of the work violates the principle of good faith and damages the identity of the work,and demand that the transferee take responsibility for breach of contract.Even if the transferor tries to seek legal remedy,it will not be difficult to protect the rights of the work in the state of authorization to apply the principle of fault liability in tort judgment.Because the transferor of the right can agree the boundary of the exercise of the property right of the work by the way of the contract terms,thus the transferee of the right of proof in the licensing contract can rely on the subjective fault of the act of adapting the work.Finally,the infringement of the right to protect the integrity of a film adaptation cannot be ignored in the logical relationship between the right to protect the integrity of a film adaptation and the right to modify a film.When judging the conflict between the right to protect the integrity of a film adaptation and the right to adapt,it is necessary to assume that the film adaptation is based on the result of the exercise of the right to adaptation.If the film adaptation is not the result of the exercise of the right to adaptation,that is,if the film adaptation does not contain original expression of the original work,it cannot constitute infringement of the copyright of the original work.A new work can only be called an adaptation in copyright law if it retains the original original expression and is substantially similar to the original.On the contrary,if the new adapted work abandons the basic expression of the original work and merely borrows or uses some elements of the original work,the new adapted work cannot be said to be an adaptation in the sense of copyright law.This work is a new work created independently by the exploiter,which has lost its logical relationship with the original work in the sense of copyright law.This "adapted" work no longer involves a judgment on whether the original work’s right to protect the integrity of the work is infringed.