Balancing Copyright - A Survey of National Approaches

How does copyright law take into account the interests of third parties, especially the general public interest in the greatest possible dissemination of knowledge and culture? Twelve questions give copyright law experts from more than forty countries, the opportunity to provide answers related to their national law about the following matters: categories of works and subject-matter, eligibility conditions, duration, users rights , the three-step test, misuse, differentiations between categories of right holders, TPM, relations of copyright law to other law areas such as fundamental rights, competition law, consumer protection law, media law etc. The standardized form of the reports makes it easy to see the impacts of copyright law in the industrialized countries as well as in emerging economies; in common-law and civil-law approaches; in countries of the Andean Community and of the European Union as well as in countries that are not party to the WIPO Treaties. A detailed preliminary chapter allows a fast overview of issues and results. This chapter also discusses the voice of academia, represented by the European Copyright Code of the Wittem Group .