China’s National Copyright Administration plans a tougher fight against online piracy, drafting new regulations on administrative copyright protections for information networks which the Communist government says it hopes will bring Chinese copyright standards closer to those coming up around the world.
Current Chinese copyright law entitles authors, performers, and content producers to protection for their dissemination rights on Internet networks, and also gives the State Council more power to stipulate protection of those rights, according to Chinese and other Asian press reports last week.
NCA official Wang Ziqiang told state run media that the forthcoming new draft will take effect before the year’s end. The regulations will likely apply to loading, saving, sending, linking, searching, and other Internet functions, according to several reports.
The Chinese move comes at a time when analysts are going deeper into understanding and trying to clarify what the New York Times calls “ One Internet, Many Copyright Laws.” At least one other Pacific region country is learning this the hard way, the paper said – Australia, where an affiliate of Project Guttenberg has run into problems for posting one of the world’s most famous novels online: Gone With The Wind.
The international copyright on the novel was believed expired in 1999, 50 years after author Margaret Mitchell’s death, but the copyright in Mitchell’s native United States, under a copyright law extension, remains in effect until 2031, 95 years after the book was first published.
Project Guttenberg, which aims to put the literature of the world into cyberspace, got a letter from attorneys representing Mitchell’s estate earlier this month and pulled down its online copy of Gone With The Wind. But the Times said November 8 that this case telegraphs a number of major copyright battles to come, particularly with some of the most famous material in the world – including much of the music by Elvis Presley and the Beatles – are not as far off as you might think before they enter the public domain.
“The case is one more example of the Internet's inherent lack of respect for national borders or, from another view, the world's lack of reckoning for the international nature of the Internet, and it is also an example of the already complicated range of copyright laws,” the Times said. “The issue of national sovereignty over the Internet has not been firmly established, either by trade agreement or by court precedent, some legal experts say, and conflicts continue to be settled individually.”
