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China's rampant piracy of American intellectual property costs the United States billions of dollars annually. This chapter examines the impact of cultural factors on a nation's interpretation of an international treaty designed to protect intellectual property rights of authors and artists. It explores the dramatic irony represented in the history and development of U.S. and Chinese adherence to the Berne Convention. It argues that the United States has read the Berne Convention in a manner consistent with the intent of the treaty and has interpreted the implications of the minimum standards it imposes; it is precisely for those hermeneutic reasons that the United States chose not to sign or even adhere to this international treaty for more than one hundred years. In contrast, China superimposed its own specifically Chinese cultural, political, and esthetic values on the European value systems embedded deeply in the Berne Convention. In other words, China read the treaty in its own idiom and interpreted the legal discourse of the Berne Convention in a manner inconsistent with the spirit and intent of the treaty.

This chapter analyzes international harmonization of intellectual property rights, tracing its history from the Paris (1883) and Berne Conventions (1886) to the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and the TRIPS Agreement of the WTO. The contents of the TRIPS Agreement and its implementation through the WTO dispute settlement mechanism are detailed. The chapter further shows how concerns triggered by the TRIPS Agreement in developing countries over negative effects in securing public health resulted in modification of the Agreement in 2001.

This chapter examines policy options and modalities for framing an international instrument on limitations and exceptions to copyright within the treaty obligations of the current international copyright system. It considers this international copyright acquis as the general starting point and evaluates options for the design of such an instrument, including questions of political sustainability and institutional home. Section I sketches the rationales for a multilateral approach to the question of limitations and exceptions. Section II explores flexibilities inside the international copyright acquis, reviews the three-step test, and assesses its import for the validity of a proposed international instrument on L&Es, particularly given the expansion of the test in the TRIPS Agreement and the interpretive jurisprudence of the WTO dispute panels. Finally, section III sets out in preliminary fashion the basic contours of a multilateral instrument on L&Es.

Copyright protection is not dependent on registration. As a result of the wide acceptance of the leading conventions, in particular the Berne Convention, literary and artistic works enjoy a similar level of protection in large parts of the world from the moment of creation. It is tempting to assume, therefore, that copyright is somehow more universal' and less territorial in nature than other forms of intellectual property, such as patents and trade marks, which are generally dependent on registration with administrative authorities whose jurisdiction is by definition territorially limited.

This chapter presents an overview of the international copyright regime and the global status of moral rights. The global system for copyright protection defines the environment for moral rights. International agreements have included some form of protection for moral rights since 1928, first appearing in the Berne Convention. Since then, their international presence has grown in two ways. First, moral rights have been adopted and modernized in an unprecedented number of jurisdictions, including a historic number of common law countries. Second, the specific question of how moral rights should respond to new technology has begun to be addressed by the WIPO Internet Treaties. The Treaties make an explicit attempt to create digital moral rights, in the form of a new moral right for performers.

This chapter explores the revisions of and special agreements to the Berne and Paris Conventions. Amongst the multilateral agreements in the international intellectual property (IP) system, these Conventions stand out as those with a long history of more than a hundred years of existence. However, international IP law has since developed outside of the two ‘classic’ conventions. Increasingly, these developments have taken place in different forums, such as trade negotiations, and in new institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This raises the question on how these new instruments relate to the classic treaties. As such, the chapter also analyses the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS) and its relations with the main pre-existing IP treaties.

One of the lesser known details of Indian copyright history is that the first copyright legislation introduced after Independence in 1955—the Copyright Bill, 1955—was actually in violation of India’s obligations under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. A determined lobbying effort led by the famous poet Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ and his contemporaries forced the Government of India to roll back these contentious provisions. The next decade saw India lead a developing country effort to reform the Berne Convention in order to make books more accessible to the people of the developing world. Although, the Indian effort to reform Berne Convention led to mixed results, the very same issues have come to the fore in the now famous University of Delhi photocopy case. This chapter explores the politics, economics, history, and law on the issue of copyright law and access to knowledge.

This chapter explores the technology-related focus of the IP-development linkage and outlines WIPO's role in the initial development paradigm, which prevailed from 1964 to 2004 when a proposal for a WIPO Development Agenda was first submitted. It then examines the WIPO Development Agenda in light of this history and identifies possible paradigm shifts discernible both in the structure of the Agenda and in preliminary considerations regarding its implementation. Finally, the chapter suggests a number of ways to interpret the WIPO Development Agenda and reflects briefly on how these different “faces” of the Agenda might inform WIPO's institutional role in responding to a spectrum of development interests in an era of rapid technological transformation.

This chapter presents European intellectual property law as a case study in private law harmonisation. It first outlines the international legal framework, which consists of international agreements such as the Paris and Berne Conventions and the TRIPS Agreement. Then it sets out some basic features of EU law in the area of intellectual property: its sources, its historical development, the EU competences in this field after the Lisbon Treaty and the impact of European intellectual property law on the law of the member states, in particular the preliminary ruling procedure as provided by Article 267 TFEU.

This chapter examines the legality of the parody exception in light of international treaties and domestic copyright laws. More specifically, it considers whether the parody exception may only be introduced into national copyright law if it satisfies the three-step test enshrined in international treaties. The chapter first traces the history and evolution of copyright law before explaining whether copyright law requires a specific parody exception and why a specific parody exception rectifies the balance between right-holders, users, and subsequent authors. It then discusses the three-step test, first incorporated into the Berne Convention to protect the ‘right of reproduction’, and its adoption in European Union texts and national legislations. It also outlines the differing interpretations of the three-step test and concludes with an analysis of whether the current parody exceptions in each of the five jurisdictions (France, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom) comply with this test.

In 1968, Auric stepped down from the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux and went into semi-retirement. He would remain active with SACEM and CISAC for the remainder of his life. With SACEM, he was particularly invested in expanding the cultural action programs and in arranging for the construction of a new headquarters building in Neuilly. With both organizations, he remained active in the copyright debates, most notably participating in the 1967 and 1971 revision conferences for the Berne Convention. During his final decade of compositional activity, Auric produced two series of chamber works that further explored the more sober, contemporary style that he had developed in his ballets of the 1950s.

This chapter gives a cursory review of situations where the rules of international intellectual property (IP) law interface with those of other rule-systems in international law. Mapping these relationships is challenging, given the multitude of rules, institutions, and actors in international law. Those have increased dramatically in number since the foundations of international IP law in the form of the Berne Convention (BC) on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Paris Convention on the Protection of Industrial Property. These interfaces, however, give evidence of a wider phenomenon which is commonly referred to as ‘fragmentation’ on the global level. Such fragmentation has provoked a debate in social, political, and legal science on how to perceive and describe this phenomenon and what responses (in particular in terms of ways to resolve conflicts or tensions between branches of international law) it calls for.