Cambodia: Purposes of Copyright Law

Purposes of Copyright Law

March 15, 2009
By Chea Sophal

Professor Kazuhiro Shiozawa, Seikei University, raised his practical experience of his personal visit to Cambodia in 1990s. He visited one of the main markets in Phnom Penh in which he could buy many copies of musical cassette tapes which were just copied in front of his eyes after he ordered what he wanted. He raised a valid point that Cambodia is now a member country of several world treaties, not only Universal Copyright Convention, but also TRIPs (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights)

Basic Structure of Copyright Law
Professor Seikei highlighted the following points on the basic structure of copyright law.

Over 150 countries are member of Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Berne Convention provides most of the fundamental rules that the member countries should obey.

Once someone produces a work in which thoughts or sentiments are expressed in a creative way and which falls within the literary, scientific, artistics or musical domain, the author of the work enjoys 2 kinds of rights, “moral rights” and “Copyright.” The law automatically provides those rights, without any need for formal declaration or registration.

Moral rights
Moral rights consists of 3 rights, divulgence, authorship, and integrity. Divulgence is a right that the author can chose when and how a work will be made available to the public. Authorship is that the author can choose how his authorship is represented in the work, like under pseudonym or anonymity. By integrity, the author can control the modification of a work.

Copyright
In this right, the authors enjoy economic right. Copyright contains several rights, that fall in 3 groups, rights for reproduction, communication, and adaptation. Reproduction rights are that the author can control the reproduction of a work, including photography, recording, and so on. Communication rights is that the author can control how a work is to be transmitted, communicated, broadcast, performed, exhibited, etc., including how copies of the work are to be distributed. Adaption rights are that the author can control the adaptation of a work through translation, dramatization, and the creation of derivative works in general.

Copyright Exceptions
Copyright contains exceptions. Utilizations of works that is considered “fair,” such as personal use, non-profit use, and educational use, are excluded from the scope of copyright. That is called “fair use.” People can utilize a work without the author’s permission if it is a “fair use.”

Duration of Copyright
Copyright lasts the lifetime of the author plus 50 years after the author’s death. So the length of copyright protection is more than 50 years, sometime it is over 100 years. During the period, authors can license people to utilize the work. The author can transfer its copyright to someone else as well.

One the whole, people can use a work in several ways; getting a license from the author or a copyright holder, just utilizing a work as a “fair use” without any permission, using a work as a mere use, and any use of the work after copyright has expired.

All those uses contribute to the cycle of creation. People produce a new work on the basis of other works. Any use such as reading novels, listening to musics, and appreciating paintings influence people to express something and to create a new work.

Main purposes of Copyright
This is a general picture of copyright law. The purpose of copyright law is to promote the diversity of cultural productions, in other works the development of culture.

Incentive doctrine states that people produce a work because they can get copyright. Giving copyright provides incentive to the authors for producing more work.

Copyright law exists because it removes hesitations of the authors in making their own work public, for safe divulgence.

Copyright law is a kind of an infrastructure for safe publication of works. Without copyright law, authors hesitate to make their work public so that people cannot enjoy variety of works. If authors are assured security of divulgence, more and more works come out to public. The society enjoys diversity of cultural works and becomes more fertile in culture.