Standards for identification of copyright infringement
According to the characteristics of copyright protection, copyright infringement The identification can be divided into the following steps:
1. Analysis of the plaintiff's works
According to the provisions of our country's laws, the creation of copyright adopts the principle of automatic protection, that is, once the creation of the work is completed, the copyright is generated. Therefore, unlike the determination of other types of intellectual property infringement such as patents and trademarks, the determination of copyright infringement also involves the issue of the validity of rights. A work with valid copyright must meet the following conditions: it belongs to the scope of works protected by copyright law; it is original; and it can be copied in some tangible form. As long as any of the conditions are not met, the plaintiff's works are not protected by copyright law. Thus, the defendant certainly did not infringe the rights. If the plaintiff's work meets both of the above conditions, the work is protected by copyright law.
2. Analysis of the allegedly infringing works and the defendant’s use
The following two criteria can be applied to the analysis of infringing works: one is "access", that is, the opportunity to come into contact with the previous work; the other is "substantial similarity", that is, the parts that should be protected by copyright are substantially similar. Among them, the latter is the focus of identification. When determining whether the plaintiff's and defendant's works are "substantially similar", the copyright-protected parts of the plaintiff's work should be compared with the corresponding parts of the defendant's work to determine whether the two are substantially similar.
In my country's judicial practice, the People's Court has also had successful cases in determining whether there is substantial similarity between the works of the plaintiff and the defendant. For example, in the case of an infringement dispute over the book "The Second Half of the Last Emperor", the Xicheng District People's Court of Beijing determined that the defendant did not infringe the copyright by affirming the originality of the defendant's work, that is, denying the substantial similarity between the defendant's work and the plaintiff's work. If the defendant's behavior is the use of works, then the defendant's use method needs to be analyzed. Relevant intellectual property laws stipulate "methods of use"have different meanings. For example, in the patent law, it refers to "implementation", that is, applying a patent to the industry, manufacturing the same product according to the instructions or using the same method; on the contrary, in the copyright law, it refers to "copying", that is, printing Make one or more copies of the work by making copies, etc. When a certain object (such as a work of applied art or a design) is protected from different angles by patent law and copyright law, special attention should be paid to distinguishing between two different ways of use: "implementation" and "copying". constitute different types of infringement.
For "copying", the most common way of using works, according to the provisions of Article 52, Paragraph 2, of my country's Copyright Law, in accordance with the project Design, product design drawings and their descriptions for construction and production of industrial products do not constitute "copying" within the meaning of copyright law. It can be seen that in our country, reproducing a two-dimensional work in a three-dimensional form does not constitute infringement of the two-dimensional work.
Based on the above, the editor has compiled relevant content about the standards for identifying copyright infringement. It can be seen that in practice, evidence must be relied on to fully and effectively prove that there is copyright infringement, and then the infringer can be required to bear corresponding legal liability and compensate for the damage caused. If you have more questions in this regard, Legal Savior Network provides professional legal consulting services.
