Copyright, also known as copyright, is the general term for the property rights and moral rights that natural persons, legal persons or other organizations enjoy in accordance with the law over literary, artistic and scientific works. The objects of rights include literary, artistic and natural science, social science, engineering and technology works created in the following forms: ① written works; ② oral works; ③ music, drama, folk art, dance, acrobatic art works; ④ fine arts and architectural works; ⑤ photographic works; ⑥ film works and works created by methods similar to filming; ⑦ engineering design drawings, product design drawings, maps, schematic diagrams and other graphic works and model works; ⑧ computer software; ⑨ other works stipulated by laws and administrative regulations.
JK Rowling, a British best-selling author known as the “mother of Harry Potter”, is worth more than 1 billion US dollars. Her work “Harry Potter” has earned 95.5 million yuan in royalties in China alone. She used copyright and IP dividends to become the first billionaire in human history to earn more than 100 million yuan from writing. Copyright is to protect the form of expression of ideas (works), not the ideas themselves, because while protecting the interests of exclusive private property rights such as copyright, it is also necessary to take into account the accumulation of human civilization and the dissemination of knowledge and information, so algorithms, mathematical methods, technology or machine designs are not the objects to be protected by copyright.
Copyright includes two aspects: personal rights and property rights. The core of copyright protection is to protect the rights of copyright owners to control the dissemination and use of works. Under traditional technical conditions, copyright owners are relatively easy to control the rights of reproduction, publication, and broadcasting of works. However, under modern network technology conditions, copyright owners face a serious threat of “out of control” of rights.
Copyright issues in cross-border e-commerce include the following two aspects: one is direct infringement, that is, without the authorization of the author or other copyright owner, any act of copying, distributing, adapting, translating, broadcasting, exhibiting, filming, etc. in any way constitutes copyright infringement; the other is indirect infringement, that is, e-commerce, network providers (ISPs) bear infringement liability due to user infringement. For example, at the end of 2015, nearly 4,000 independent cross-border e-commerce websites that mainly sold wedding dresses were sued by an American company on the grounds that these websites were suspected of infringing the copyright of an American wedding dress company, and the PayPal accounts of these companies were also frozen.