PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF COPYRIGHT LEGAL PROTECTION IN THE
INTERNET AND THE WAYS OF
SOLUTION
The development of
information technologies and continuous growth of the
number of global Internet users generate a lot of violations in the field of
copyright.
The Law of Ukraine "On Copyright and Related Rights", the last edition 2011
(hereinafter - the Law), provides a list of copyright [1]:
* Written literary works of fiction, journalistic, scientific, technical or
other nature;
* Computer programs;
* A database;
* Musical works with or without text;
* Audiovisual works;
* Works of fine art;
* Photographic works, including works made by methods similar to
photography;
* Illustrations, maps, plans, drawings, sketches and other works relating to
geography, geology, topography, engineering, architecture, and other activities;
* Collections of essays, encyclopedias, anthologies, compilations and other
composite works that are the result of creative work on the selection,
coordination and ordering of content, made without infringement of copyright for
works that are part of them as component parts.
It is well known that information
Internet resources contain the information
listed above and provided in electronic form. It is clear that this is an
indisputable fact complicates compliance with the current legislation of Ukraine
in enforcing copyright owners' rights to such information.
It should be noted, that the current legislation of Ukraine ( art. 1109 of
Civil Code [2 ], art. art. 31, 32 of the Act) requires the parties of the
agreement on the disposition of copyrights, to indicate the specific rights
assigned under the contract, where the subject of copyright law should regulate
the rights and methods of use. However, in a real situation when there is no
single qualification of actions regarding the placement of copyright works on
the Internet, the rights of the person to whom they are transferred under the
agreement are violated almost everywhere. Violation of rights on composition may
take two forms: 1 - form of violation of property; 2 - form of violation of
moral rights.
In the first case, it is - posting information on the web-site and providing
public access to it without author’s permission, as a result of which the author
loses the profit that he could get by permitting the use of his information.
In the second case, violation of non-property rights, whether the authorship
of the posted material will be assigned by a different person, that is, we are
talking about plagiarism.
It should be noted, that according to Article 15 of the Act, the property
rights of the author include the exclusive right to use the composition and the
exclusive right to authorize or ban the use by other persons. And the term "use"
in its turn, includes the ability to play, publicly display and display,
transfer, processing and distribution of their works through sale, putting a
property lease, commercial rental. In this case, there is no clear clarity if
the placement of copyright in the
Internet is one of the ways to use a composition. If we turn to practice, in
particular, to the judiciary.
According to paragraph 29 of Recommendations of the Presidium of the Supreme
Economic Court of Ukraine of 10.06.2004 № 04-5/1107 «On some issues of dispute
resolution practice relating to the protection of intellectual property rights"
placing the composition on the Internet in a form accessible to the public use,
is their reproduction within the meaning of Article 1 of the law, and so such
placement of products is covered by Article 15 of this Law. [3]
Also, according to paragraph 31 Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme
Court of Ukraine of 04.06.2010, #5, "On the application of the legislation by
the courts in cases of copyright protection and related rights" placing
composition on the Internet in a form accessible to the public use, means
presenting the compositions to the public, in a way that its representatives may
access the works from a place and at any time of their own choosing, in
accordance with paragraph 9 of the third part of Article 15 of Law number 3792 -
XII, it mean that this placing is lawful only with a permission of the author or
any other person who owns the copyright. [4]
According to Article 1 of the Law number 3792-XII reproduction is the making
of one or more copies of a work, video programs, phonograms in any form, as well
as their entry for the temporary or permanent storage in electronic (including
digital), optical or other form, which a computer can read. Article 14 of the
Act provides the author's right to claim authorship, by specifying the proper
name of the author on the product and its duplicate.
Protection of property and non-property rights can have a judicial or
non-judicial character.
However, in the legislative framework of Ukraine there is no clear
algorithm
to bring those responsible to justice for the dissemination of information
through the posting on the resources (sites) on the Internet. Here, first of
all, is taking into account a profit or providing free access without the
permission of the author or copyright holder information.
At the beginning, the subject of the violated rights may prevent the
resource owner of the violation and ask to stop copyright infringement by
removing information from the site, or ask the author to identify the name of
the product. After that, you can go to court protection methods.
However, the current legislation of Ukraine does not allow to implement
strictly regulated procedure to establish the liability of persons who are the
owners of Internet resources that violate copyrights.
To solve this problem, you must make the appropriate changes:
1. In the law of Ukraine "About telecommunication" to make the definition of
" owner of the domain."
2. Create a state registry of owners of domain names in a national domain
zone .ua, including regional ones, such as .org.ua,
.kiev.ua,
.odessa.ua, .od.ua etc.
3. To provide hard-coded rules for registering domain names with the
possibility of mandatory background checks for the owner of a domain while the
registration of domain is from Ukrainian segment of global
Internet network.
In this case, the rights holders will have a real opportunity to personalize
responsibility for unauthorized posting of copyright on the Internet.
Source: Author publication
Published: 4.11.2013
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