The main issue that this thesis deals with is the interaction between the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in ESA vs. SOCAN and the new making available right introduced in Canada’s Copyright Modernization Act. The thesis analyzes the approach of the Supreme Court of Canada in ESA vs. SOCAN and examines the legislative history of the making available right on both global and domestic levels. A conclusion drawn by this thesis is that, the scope of the communication right in Canada’s Copyright Act should be expanded after the introduction of the making available right in order to cover a variety of digital transmissions including downloading, P2P file sharing and other interactive transmissions.

The main issue that this thesis deals with is the interaction between the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in ESA vs. SOCAN and the new making available right introduced in Canada’s Copyright Modernization Act. The thesis analyzes the approach of the Supreme Court of Canada in ESA vs. SOCAN and examines the legislative history of the making available right on both global and domestic levels. A conclusion drawn by this thesis is that, the scope of the communication right in Canada’s Copyright Act should be expanded after the introduction of the making available right in order to cover a variety of digital transmissions including downloading, P2P file sharing and other interactive transmissions.

The topic of this thesis is copyright protection of databases. The aim of the thesis is to find out, via comparison of the different legal systems, if the European legislation of legal protection of databases is proper, adequate and if it reflects the current needs of the European society. The thesis contains a brief historical description leading to the current legislation. Next to descriptive and comparative method of research author uses also analytical method of research for analyzing the legislation and provides to readers his own opinion toward the chosen topic. The thesis deals with the European Union and USA legislation in the field of database legal protection. As for European legislation, the author puts emphasis on copyright law protection and on so-called sui generis right. The thesis consists of Introduction, Conclusion and another 9 chapters. The second chapter provides the basic terms and problems of the topic. The third chapter contains international treaties relating to databases. The following three chapters relate to the European Union legislation, where the author describes the historical process leading to adoption of directive on the legal protection of databases in 1996. This directive is analyzed and the author articulates his opinions toward the directive. Chapter number...

Syftet med upphovsrätten är att främja nyskapande och att erbjuda upphovsmän en möjlighet att få ersättning för sina upphovsrättsskyddade verk. Samtidigt finns det ett intresse från allmänhetens sida att kunna ta del av dessa verk och utnyttja dem. Det gäller således att hitta en balans mellan allmänhetens och upphovsmannens intresse, varför inskränkningarna i 2 kap. URL har införts. Denna uppsats behandlar inskränkningen i 23 § 1 st. 3 p. URL enligt vilken tidningar och tidskrifter har en rätt att publicera fotografier utan tillstånd från fotografen i samband med en redogörelse för en dagshändelse om det sker i enlighet med god sed och är motiverat av ändamålet. På grund av den tekniska och digitala utveckligen har den digitala miljön förändrats mycket under de senaste åren. Sättet att skapa, distibuera och använda verk har påverkats och användandet av fotografier har ökat märkbart. När inskränkningen infördes var endast tidningar i analog form aktuella medan tidningar i digital form nu har tagit över. Även om lagen är teknikneutral är det inte alltid klart hur inskränkningens rekvisit ska tolkas med hänsyn till den digitala miljön och många frågor anses oklara. I oktober 2018 meddelade Patent- och marknadsöverdomstolen dom i mål PMT 722-17 (DN-målet), vari huvudfrågorna var om fotografierna i målet hade återgetts i samband med en dagshändelse och om Dagens Nyheter hade rätt att publicera fotografierna på sin webbplats och på sitt Twitterkonto. Syftet med framställningen har varit att analysera rättsläget när det kommer till inskränkningen i 23 § 1 st. 3 p. URL och att undersöka vilka rättsliga effekter DN-målet haft. Vad gäller inskränkningen kan konstateras att den gäller för publicering såväl analogt som digitalt. För att inskränkningen ska vara tillämplig på webbplatser och konton på sociala medier måste emellertid en stark koppling mellan den tryckta tidningen och informationsdatabasen föreligga. DN-målet har medfört en långtgående rätt för medier att publicera fotografier utan tillstånd i samband med en redogörelse för en dagshändelse eftersom Patent- och marknadsöverdomstolen tillät publicering av fotografier som inte hade ett självklart och direkt samband med dagshändelsen. En långtgående rätt kan anses strida mot upphovsrättens syfte och vara en för stor begränsning i fotografens ensamrätt enligt 49 a § URL. Att fotografier dessutom får publiceras utan att fotografen får någon ersättning för återgivandet torde åtgärdas. Hur en sådan ersättning ska ges är inte helt klart, en möjlighet skulle emellertid vara en generell avtalslicens. / The purpose of copyright law is to promote innovation and to offer authors an opportunity to receive compensation for their copyrighted works. At the same time, there is an interest from the public to be able to access these works and use them. It is, therefore, a question of finding a balance between the public and the authors' interests, which is why the limitations in the second chapter in URL have been introduced. This thesis deals with the limitation in 23 § 1 p. 3 p. URL which regulates newspapers' and magazines' rights to publish photographs without permission in conncection with the reporting of current events if it is done in accordance with good practice and is justified by the purpose. Due to technical and digital developments, the digital environment has changed a lot in recent years. The way to create, distribute and use works has been affected. Even the use of photographs has increased noticeably. When the limitation was introduced, there was only printed newspapers while digital newspapers now haven become more popular. Even though the law does not distinguish printed and digital newspapers, it is not always clear how the limitation should be interpreted with regards to the digital environment. Therefore, many issues are considered to be unclear. In October 2018 the Patent and Market Court of Appeal announced its judgement in case PMT 722-17 (DN-case), where the main questions were whether the relevant photographs had been reproduced in connection with the reporting of a current event and whether Dagens Nyheter had the right to publish the photographs on their website and Twitter account. The purpose of this thesis has been to analyse the legal situation regarding the limitation and to investigate the legal effects of the DN-case. Regarding the limitation, it can be stated that it applies to both analogue and digital publishing. However, in order for the limitation to apply to websites and social media accounts, they have to have a strong connection with the printed newspaper. The DN-case has led to an advanced right for media to publish photographs without permission when reporting current events. A right that is so advanced can be considered as contrary to the purpose of copyright law and to be too restrictive in the photographers' exclusive right according to 49 a § URL. The fact that photographs may also be published without the photographer receiving any kind of compensation should be fixed. How the compensation should be given is not clear, however, a possibility could be a general license agreement.

Digital Rights Management systems (DRM) are frequently used by rightsholders in order to protect their works from the, very high indeed, possibility to be copied, altered or distributed without authorisation by users who take advantage of available state-of-the-art copying techniques. Because DRM are legally protected by anti-circumvention legislation both in the United States and in Europe, a debate goes on more than a decade now regarding their impact to the notion of “balance” among copyright stakeholders that traditionally underpinned copyright law. In this context, this study examines, in turn, the philosophical underpinnings of analogue and digital copyright law focusing of copyright exceptions, the development of a notion of a minimum of lawful personal use for the digital environment based on existing copyright exceptions and users’ expectations of personal use, and the impact of the use of DRM and of the introduction of anti-circumvention legislation to this notion. While the European Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC (EUCD) is the main legal instrument analysed and criticised, the role of other Directives is also examined to the extent they address the relationship between lawful personal use and anticircumvention legislation. Legal developments in the United States could not have been absent from this discussion since anti-circumvention legislation was introduced there much earlier than the EUCD and important case-law and legal commentaries have developed since. Following the identification of problems regarding the operation of a minimum of lawful personal use in digital settings, the proposal to introduce a right to engage in self-help circumvention afforded to users of DRM-protected works for Europe is put-forward. Such a right would not undermine rightsholders incentives to offer works online and develop new business models but would acknowledge the users’ interest to interact and tinker with digital works taking full advantage of the new possibilities offered by digitisation.

facilitated the licensing of music to the benefits of right holders and commercial users alike. In the online realm, however, the rationale of the collective administration of copyright has been challenged and its functioning re-configured. At a moment in time where the Internet has made the cross-border distribution of recorded music easier than ever, right holders are yet to find licensing solutions appropriate for multi- territorial online uses. This, in turn, slows down the uptake of legal online music services and prevents the realisation of the Digital Single Market, pursued within the EU. The European Commission has intervened twice, first in 2005 in the form of a non-binding Recommendation, and later in 2008, when it held that the collecting societies' practice of restricting their activities to their respective domestic territory was anti-competitive. Arguably, the contradictory effects of EU action have exacerbated rather than remedied the existing difficulties that cross-border online music services face in clearing the necessary authors' rights. This thesis proposes to re-contextualise this problem around cultural diversity, which is a recurring buzzword in the ongoing debates and which EU institutions are legally obliged to promote and to respect. Despite this seeming acknowledgment of the concept, no sound legal analysis of its scope or its implications for the field of online music has yet been proposed. Pursuing such analysis, this thesis first examines the meaning of cultural diversity under EU law to submit an understanding of it as intercultural pluralism. It then assesses the boundaries of the EU obligation to promote cultural diversity in view of the goals of the UNESCO Convention on the Promotion and Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. An analysis of the relationship between the two sets of norms suggests interpreting the EU mandate of promoting cultural diversity in light of the scope of the international obligations wherever EU action affects cultural creations. Applied to the context of online music, this novel interpretation implies that cultural diversity is promoted if all groups within the EU (a) have the ability to express their cultural identity through online music; and (b) are in a position to access online music expressing different cultures from within and outside the EU. Cultural diversity thus calls for the licensing regime to be reorganised so that online music services may, in a simple and effective way, clear the rights necessary for the online use of the entire available EU repertoire as well as a diverse foreign and, ideally, the entire worldwide repertoire. Finally, this thesis assesses the current online licensing mechanisms in a practical application of these findings, testing the commonly raised argument that collective rights management promotes cultural diversity and investigating, in parallel, whether the practical consequences of the EU interventions have promoted the diversity of online music.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

This study is to explore how Chinese software users perceive the issues of software copyright and piracy. Tianya Community, the largest online public forum in China, was selected as a site to study users' online communication about software copyright and piracy. Data were collected over five discussion boards in which software copyright and piracy were discussed extensively to retrieve 561 posting threads with 6,150 messages ranging from March 1, 1999 to June 30, 2007. Lindlof and Taylor's (2002) qualitative communication research methods were used to locate and analyze the recurring dominant themes within the online discussion by Chinese Internet users. The study revealed two opposing discourses existing in software users? perceptions, which represent globalization and anti-globalization processes surrounding software copyright and piracy. Mittleman and Chin's (2005) theoretical framework was adopted to interpret material and spiritual tensions between human/material factors, such as software owners, software users, China, and foreign developed countries. Meanwhile, the actor-network theory was applied to map out the roles of non-human/non-material factors, such as new technology, patriotism, and Chinese culture, which function to moderate the existing confrontations between globalization and anti-globalization by preventing software users from totally falling down into either direction of supporting or opposing software piracy. As a result, both forces of conformity and resistance were found to coexist within software users' perceptions and fragment their identities. To deal with fragmented identities, Chinese software users generally adopted a flexible, discriminative position composed by a series of distinctions, between offline purchasing of pirated discs and software download, between enterprise users and individual users, between foreign and local software companies, between freeware/open-source software and copyright/pirated software, between software companies and independent software developers, and between conceptual recognition and behavioral practice. Meanwhile, traditional resistance movements of Polanyi's (1957) counter-movements and Gramsci's (1971) counter-hegemony were reduced from collective contestations with openly declared call for resistance to Scott's (1990) notion of infra-politics that was communicated among software users and expressed in their everyday practice of piracy use but not in public and government discourse.

The problem of copyright infringement has always been a focus of concern of copyright owners and law enforcement units. P2P (peer-to-peer) software is one of the major ways to acquire unauthorized files on campus. In the 96th academic year, The Ministry of Education proclaimed the prohibition against P2P software using, issuing governmental documents to request every university to restrain students from using P2P software and to promote related measures. As an effect analysis to the P2P software restrain this time, this study had conducted an investigation and an analysis according to the above background, trying to find the perceptions of the students under the contol, and to explain how these perceptions impact the behavior intention on. This study is revealing that though anti-P2P campaigns generally influence every perception like subjective norm, perceived risk, moral judgment, knowledge of copyright (the mediating variables) of the students, there is only an evident effect of moral judgment on behavior intention. As for the effects of other perceptions, they are not prominent. The study¡¦s result can provide schools with not only some practical suggestions concerning how to plan restrain strategies, but also a resource of references to develop campus piracy model for following researchers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri, Columbia, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.