Comment Re:State sponsored copyright infrigment? (Score 2, Interesting) 189
Actually,
European Copyright law has traditionally viewed copyright as an extension of natural law. In particular, rather than the utilitarian tradition of anglo-saxon copyright, continental systems have viewed it as an extension of the moral rights of authorship.
In that sense, it's more difficult to argue for principles such as fair use or mandatory licensing, attributes easily explained and rationalized within the anglo-saxon worldview.
Of course, international treaties are essentially hybridizing all of this law. From what I've seen, though, moral rights are more likely to be imported into our regime than fair use into "theirs." For instance, the Berne convention has a mandatory provision for a subset of author's moral rights, but only permissive grants of authority for national governments to establish fair use type rights, if they so choose.
European Copyright law has traditionally viewed copyright as an extension of natural law. In particular, rather than the utilitarian tradition of anglo-saxon copyright, continental systems have viewed it as an extension of the moral rights of authorship.
In that sense, it's more difficult to argue for principles such as fair use or mandatory licensing, attributes easily explained and rationalized within the anglo-saxon worldview.
Of course, international treaties are essentially hybridizing all of this law. From what I've seen, though, moral rights are more likely to be imported into our regime than fair use into "theirs." For instance, the Berne convention has a mandatory provision for a subset of author's moral rights, but only permissive grants of authority for national governments to establish fair use type rights, if they so choose.
