Topic 15: The Proprietary World: The WIPO Intellectual Property model
Topic 16: More WIPO: Contracts and Licenses
Study the Anglo-American and Continental European school of IP. Write a short comparative analysis to your blog (if you have clear preference for one over another, explain that, too).
The recognition and protection of private property rights, including IP, largely depends on whether a nation is a common law or civil law jurisdiction, and also, on whether it has adopted a Continental or an Anglo-American form of capitalism as its national economic system.
Blue: Civil law. Red: Common law. Brown: Bijuridical (civil and common law).
Green: Customary law. Yellow: Fiqh.
It is often said that the common law is primarily concerned with the protection of economic rights, whereas countries that follow civil law tradition concentrate on the moral rights of the author and analogous creators. While there is doubtless a great deal of oversimplification in these views, and maybe even a measure of racial stereotyping, there is also more than a grain of truth. (David T. Keeling, Intellectual Property Rights in EU Law: Free Movement and Competition Law, pp. 263)
The prime inspiration for both systems, the Continental and the Anglo-American, is the cultural importance of authors, but the focus of the Continental European is even more the author while the Anglo-American is more focused on the commercial part of the copyright. Copyright protection is divided into two categories, economic rights and moral rights. Moral rights focus more on the author as a person while economic rights focus on the financial profit which can be made from a work.
Moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if an artist has assigned his or her rights to a work to a third party, he or she still maintains the moral rights to the work. In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign their moral rights (unlike the copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which can be sold, licensed, lent, mortgaged or given like any other property). They can agree not to enforce them and such terms are very common in contracts in Europe. Moral rights have had a less robust tradition within the Anglo-American school, where the protection for moral rights has, up until today, been very slim and is still not as strong as within the Continental European school.
The most important international convention which regulates copyright is the Berne Convention. The convention was a compromise between the Anglo-American approach and the Continental European approach. Article 6bis of the Berne Convention protects attribution and integrity, stating: Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation. However, when the United States signed the Berne Convention, it stipulated that the Convention's "moral rights" provisions were addressed sufficiently by other statutes, such as laws covering slander and libel.
Despite the laws being standardized to some extent, consistencies among different nations remain, each jurisdiction has separate and distinct laws and regulations about copyright. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) summarizes each of its member states' intellectual property laws on its website. WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations that was established by the WIPO Convention in 1967 with a mandate from its Member States to promote the protection of IP throughout the world through cooperation among states and in collaboration with other international organizations. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.
See World Intellectual Property Organization - An Overview (2010 Edition) for more information.
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