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US IP Law Comparisons with Other Countries?
jpalk asks: "Something I've been wondering about lately is how US
intellectual property laws stack up with those from other industrialized nations? Specifically, I've been wondering about things
like the durations of copyrights and patents and the number of works
that are patented/copywrighted every year vs. the number of such that
expire. I know where to find (some) of that information for the US,
but I'm clueless about where to find that for other countries." How many countries have IP laws that differ significantly from the framework established by the International Copyright Laws?
The English model is not prevalent around Europe. I utterly fail to understand how people got this impression.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
The reason for this (near as I can tell) is that these countries have undergone a switch from what I call "productionism" to "consumerism".
Well, actually the reason most European nations, Canada, and actually a whole lot of other countries are similar in terms of IP laws is because of the Berne Convention. For a full list of countries that have signed on check out some interesting info on the Berne Convention at wipo.org There are too many to list here.
Anyway, the three principles behind the convention are:
So that pretty much explains why the laws are all the same: per the Berne Convention they have to be.
My journal has hot
The length is pretty simple to explain - longer patents benefit the corporation (or, in less than 1 percent, the individual) holding the patent. The US politicians take whopping bribes...er, PAC and soft money, and repay their benefactors by extending the patents.
I'm not up on my European law, but England had two points that kept the patent system a lot less corrupt - first, many patents were shot down simply because they were viewed as either 'stifling legitimate competition', or against public interest. The second was that it used to cost a heck of a lot to actually patent something, making spurious and incremental patents much less prevelent than the US.
The second point is what is allowable. To give the simplest example, Europe won't allow you to patent life forms, while it's big business in the US. (Go Stargazers!)
Finally, while the trend is slowing, the US allowed a given patent to cover far more than England (and, AFAIK, Europe). Look at Bell's patent, and read about just how much ended up paying to use it, for a case study in legal elegance. In England, a patent could be struck down if any part of it was invalid (i.e. you patent a new car engine, but forget to specifically exclude the spark plugs, tough). The US _does_ have similar laws ... just that they rarely see the light of day. The US, geez, there was some guy who had patented 'sending music over wires using modulated electricity'. And you thought RIAA was bad!
Finally, the US is exactly like England and Europe in one regard - the patent system, since it's inception, has become just another place where corporations (and individuals) fight to establish dominance. The practice of 'licensing' highly questionable patents to a few of your close business partners (for under-the-table considerations), then going after your actual opponents in court ("But your honor, these seven other highly respected software companies are paying licensing fees, Sun is obviously just being criminal!) dates back to the first few years after the patent office came into existence.
It's only 0.5% according to that website, but still it's a totally stupid pattent.
Anyone in the US managed to pattent bottles yet ?
Or words to that effect
On the copyright front, the U.S. adopted the Berne Convention in 1989, which did away with a lot of formalities and mandated national treatment of copyright owners from other member companies. Thanks to this law, copyright owners can sue infringers in most countries without much trouble.
On the patent front, there's been a lot of harmonization of procedures, starting in the 19th century, but really picking up speed with the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and more recently with the NAFTA and TRIPS and WTO agreements and a few other changes since 1990-96. By giving up some of its dearly held parochial (and protectionist) differences (e.g., 17 year term from patent issue, blindness to foreign invention in determining priority), the U.S., again being driven by industry, got many foreign countries to agree to start meaningfully enacting/enforcing IP laws to protect drugs, software and music. This is part of what people are calling Globalization.
Today, there are still differences in what various countries will protect under patent law, with the U.S. still way out in front on life forms, software and business methods, some of this as a result of grass roots political pressure in addition to big corporation pressure.
For software and Internet stuff, however, the U.S. is such a big market that the international scene becomes less significant. Who would make a big investment elsewhere in a software business in which someone else has already tied up the U.S. rights? Also, with broad concepts of jurisdiction that developed with respect to domain name issues (not to mention antitrust and securities!), conduct outside the U.S. has a way of ending up in front of the U.S. courts.
The bottom line is that in many respects, it's really ONE WORLD now in the IP business.
Then of course there's the article Against Intellectual Property by Australian academic Brian Martin (which was a /. article a few months back).
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
If you think the US patent system is messed up, a Russian company name Intellekt managed to get patents on bottles, nails, and railroad tracks.
As with the USPO the Russian patent examiners appear to only consider previous patents as "prior art" and to have overworked examiners. The difference is that the Russians regard this as a problem and the filing of such patents as a kindof fraud.
See this article for more details.
Not that anyone would want to actually answer the original question posted in the article or anything, but WIPO has a number of resources that might help.
.INT TLD! Also, be aware that the default search page is Java-enabled, so pick HTML-only, if you aren't]
There's the WIPO Collection of Laws for International Access (CLEA) [Note the the
You might enjoy browsing the "International Patent Data Collections (When it's complete, it hopes to cover the world - not yet complete, however)
In fact, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) or OMPI (Organization Mondiale Proprietaire Intellectuelle - pardon my French) has recently put a lot of new materials on its website, so it's worth a second visit, even if you thought you were familiar with WIPO offerings
And finally, there's WipoNET which is gradually providing access to all the IP offices in the WIPO member nations.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
In so far as it's enacted by the UK's Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988 (which does exactly what it says on the can) "moral right" is the right not to have one's work falsely attributed to someone else, or a derivative of one's work attributed to oneself, plus some other minor bits and pieces that don't amount to much. Interestingly, it's legally impossible to sell or sign these away.
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Actually, it isn't "Microsoft Beer" but Windows 99(TM) Beer. Read the article from St. Petersburg Times and the Slashdot discussion.
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Most developed countries are signatories to the Berne Convention which sets international standards for IP Laws. Countries that are not generally are undeveloped third world nations that have economies that are barely keeping (or maybe not) their population alive.
PERFORMERS, PRODUCERS OF PHONOGRAMS
AND BROADCASTING ORGANISATIONS (1961)
Article 5
1. Each Contracting State shall grant national treatment to producers of phonograms if any of the following conditions is met:
(a) the producer of phonogram is a national of another Contracting State (criterion of nationality);
...
Is is generally true that the creator of a work is recognized as one and the same person in all countries (even in those that haven't signed the relevant treaties), but the creator isn't always identical to the copyright owner.
Different countries have different rules regarding who owns what rights with respect to works made for hire. Normally such issues are resolved by explicit clauses in the work contract, but in the absence of such a clause something made for hire in the USA may be found to belong to the employer in the USA but to the physical author in, say, Sweden.
If the author dies without selling his copyright, it is inherited according to either an explicit will or inheritance laws. If the author has no living heirs, again different countries have different laws with respect to where the property ends up. In Sweden, inheritance without heirs goes to a special fund, Allmänna Arvsfonden, which awards money for charity purposes. In the USA, I believe it's simply collected by the government.
A recent, strange case is that of the copyright to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf . The Free State of Bavaria, which considers itself the legal owner of Hitler's estate, sued a Swedish publisher for copyright infringement. However, the Swedish Supreme Court declared that Bavaria was not the legal owner of Hitler's works in Sweden, and they were therefore not allowed to bring the lawsuit in the first place. Unfortunately, the publisher was in the process unable to show that he had obtained the rights from anyone to publish the book, so the Supreme Court upheld a ban on the publication issued earlier.
One posssible basis for copyrights is "natural law", where an author has rights to their works forever. (eg. IP is very similar to physical property)
Another is "instrumentalist theory", where copyrights give an author some control for a limited time, to induce authors to create works.
Then there's "droit moral" (supported by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), which says something along the lines of: "property is acquired not necessarily by labor, but rather by one's joining of his individual Will to some object external to the self. As a result of this process, the thing possessed comes to embody the owner's personality". As a result, if someone disrespects/parodies/any-action, it's said that they're partly doing that to the author. "no strange work be presented as his, but that his own work not be presented in a changed form." Also, some followers of this theory separate authors' rights into two classes: alienable and inalienable. This seems to be a nice compromise between the two previous theories.
I don't know how accurate or current the paper is. But it's an interesting difference, IMHO.
--
You will more than likely see similar IP laws among most of the European Nations, as well as in Canada, and quite possibly Japan.
The reason for this (near as I can tell) is that these countries have undergone a switch from what I call "productionism" to "consumerism".
A simpler explanation would be that the same corporate interests, indeed in many cases the same corporate organisations, are lobbying for such changes in law.
Also "consumerism" is a poor term since the people who's interests are least served by the new versions of IP laws are consumers (and other end users.)
<p>
Even though the French legislation fully complies with international agreements on copyright law, it keeps as its primary reference the notion of droit d'auteur, or 'authorright', and considers an author has permanent, inalienable and non-transferable rights on their creation. An example is that French movie directors are much more likely to have the final cut than producers in France.
<p>
Concerning patents, things are mostly managed on the EU level, with roughly the same rules as the US patent office, except that patents are more expensive to file, so their is not this flood of nonsense patent applications.
Short, untrue but useful, answer: not much variation in practice. The following are broad answers to give a sense of an answer -- the devil truly lies in the details.
Although the answers below suggest substantial verisimilitude, there are differences from country to country, both in terms of the subject matter and scope of protection available, that make it necessary for individuals to get specific advice for each nation in which protection is sought.
While there are substantial similarities in terms of IP these days, there remain substantial differences in other regards, and this may impact on the generality of the remarks below. Each nation protects different things differently, and sometimes gives different terms of protection for each.
Patents:
In most industrial nations, the term of a utility patent is twenty (20) years from the date of first filing in the first nation in which protection was sought, regardless when the patent issued. This was not the case in the United States until the nineties, before which the term was seventeen (17) years from the date the patent issued. However, the United States now follows the international model.
Copyrights
The well-adhered-to Berne convention requires a minimum term of life of the author plus 50 years. The UCC requires only a minimum term of the life of the author plus 25 years. Signatory nations may have longer terms if they see fit.
However, the European Union, and later, the United States have extended their term for published works to life of the author plus 70 years. Many nations accordingly feel pressure to, and either have or are anticipated to, increase their terms accordingly.
Under various circumstances, other terms may apply. Some nations give different, sometimes fixed, terms for motion pictures, computer software and the like. Your mileage may vary. ENESCO has an excellent page with English language translations of international copyright law for those interested in researching the interstices.
Trademarks
In many industrial nations, including the United States, trademarks or their analogues have potentially indefinite terms -- typically lasting so long as the trademark remains valid, and the trademark owner conforms with applicable registration requirements.
On the contrary. Quite bit of Europe is considered as a part of the French-Roman civil law tradition, while most of the rest, with the exception of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, are considered as a part of the German-Romand civil law tradition. Scotland is unique in itself, it is partly common law, partly roman law which applies. You have other mixtures, like The Netherlands which is a mix of German-Roman and French-Roman Law. Belgium is firmly rooted in the French-Roman civil tradition for example. Not that these distinctions matter that much, since intellectual property is one of the fields where most systems are converging.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Due to the fact that a lot of the details of American law is based on the English model, which is also prevalent around Europe, there aren't that many differences in the fundamental concepts behind intellectual property laws in much of the world.
Of course, the actual figures will be different owing to America's vast corporate feudal lords have more influence upon the state than in other countries, and passing laws to get all kinds of IP extended in their favour. And when Bush wins the election, you can be sure that the situation will get even worse as his corporate masters carry on pimping him...
Jon Erikson, IT guru
All I know is that you can buy Microsoft beer in Russia. I want to know how long it will be before I can buy Intel toilet paper and Apple condoms in America.
The reason for this (near as I can tell) is that these countries have undergone a switch from what I call "productionism" to "consumerism".
Basically, production based societies are oriented towards making goods to ship/export all over the world. Consumer based societies not only make and consume their own items, but that of other societies.
In countries with a low amount of consumerism (I.E. Saudi Arabia) IP laws exist, but are not enforced strongly. Countries that make goods based on so called "prior art" or are direct copies, generally tend to not consume those same items. (If they did, Habib A would be screaming bloody murder about Habib B stealing his work.)
In European countries (I.E. westernized) the trend goes in the opposite direction. For the most part, you will see high amounts of enforcement, and legal rights over Intellectual Property, and very little actual "balloon stealing."
This is because your consumer who wants a "Sony Walkman" is probably going to go buy a "Sony" Walkman, and not some re-skinned knock off.
Another thing that helps westernized nations in this is a significant increase in so called "Commercial Centers." The trend away from open air markets in small villages keeps knock offs, which are produced in a limited supply from gaining shelf space in your local shopping plaza.
IP laws are usually pretty fair the world over. Any developing nation probably has some law or another on the subject. The difference comes in how the consumer views the object being copied, or in how the object maker can sell his or her wares.
krystal_blade
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