Research On Copyright Ownership Of Audio-visual Works

The copyright ownership rule of audio-visual works is an important result of the third amendment of the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China.At present,updating and iteration of media platforms and new technologies make it difficult for the original types of works to cover the new works constantly emerging.The audio-visual industry urgently needs to expand the scope of protection and reshape the pattern of interests with a new ownership rule.Article 17 of the Copyright Law implemented in June 2021 is about the copyright ownership of audio-visual works,which has realized this legislative purpose to a certain extent.The rule system of copyright ownership of audio-visual works in China mainly includes Article 17 of Copyright Law and the provisions on film and TV drama copyright owners in administrative regulations.In the process of revising the copyright law,each version of the draft legislation involves the types of audio-visual works,copyright ownership,the scope of authors and their rights,and the expression of the relevant content has been changed several times.This shows that legislators have different opinions on how to construct the value structure of copyright ownership of audio-visual works in China.At present,the practice of copyright ownership of audio-visual works in China can be investigated from two dimensions:judicial practice and industry practice.There are three problems in practice:first,the argument on the types of audio-visual works in the judgment is insufficient,which is difficult to be convincing.Second,the copyright marks of audio-visual works are inconsistent in industry practice.Thirdly,the judgments usually only determine who is the copyright owner of audio-visual works according to the copyright marks on the audio-visual works,which may omit or falsely increase the copyright owner.The causes of the above problems are that there are four major problems in the copyright ownership rules of audio-visual works:First,the lack of the concept and identification standard of audio-visual works,producers and authors.Second,it violates the basic principles of "Author owns original copyright" and the principle of "The author’s moral rights are not transferable".Third,the protection focus of copyright ownership rules is not clear and the rules are mixed with the legislative logic of author’s right system and copyright system.The legislator does not coordinate the contradictory external rules,which is the root of the problems in the ownership rules.Fourth,the classification standard of audio-visual works is not clear,and it is difficult to judge whether a work belongs to "film and TV series" or "other audio-visual works".There are mainly two modes for the copyright ownership of audio-visual works in foreign legislation:one mode is that the author enjoys the copyright under the author right system,the other mode is that the producer enjoys the copyright under the copyright system.Although the ownership subjects of audio-visual works copyright are completely different,the legal logic of ownership of audio-visual works in foreign countries is smooth,and the balance of interests of all parties concerned in audio-visual works is realized by the use of supporting legal provisions.Therefore,through the comparative study of the relevant provisions of the two systems and international conventions,some inspirations can be obtained:In designing the copyright ownership of audio-visual works,Chinese legislators should strengthen the legislative focus of protecting producers in the allocation of property rights,so as to avoid the legal conflicts and disharmony brought by referring to foreign rules.The law should respect the basic principles of copyright law and regards the producer as the author so as to realize the logical self-consistency that the producer owns original copyright.At the same time,the legislative error caused by "author owns the right of authorship" need be amended to avoid the existence of two rights of authorship on the works.And Copyright Law should adopt the agreed way to realize the author’s right to avoid destroying the principle of "The author’s moral rights are not transferable",timely supply the missing important concepts,and clarify the identification standards of audio-visual works,producers and authors.The legislator should also perfect the judgment standard of types of audio-visual works,apply different ownership rules to different types of audio-visual works copyright,and realize the balance of interests of audio-visual industry pattern.