Copyright, also known as copyright, refers to 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. Generally speaking, the object of copyright refers to literary, artistic and scientific works (referred to as “works”) recognized by the Copyright Law. The core content of copyright protection is to ensure that the copyright owner has the right to control the dissemination and use of works. Under the conditions of traditional dissemination technology, the rights of reproduction, distribution, broadcasting, etc. basically guarantee the copyright owner’s control over the copyrighted works. However, under the e-commerce ring wall of the Internet, the copyright owner faces a serious threat of “losing control” of the works.
Copyright issues in e-commerce can be summarized as two aspects: one is direct rights, that is, copying, publishing, distributing, modifying, translating, broadcasting, performing, exhibiting, filming, etc. in any way without the permission of the author or other copyright owner constitutes a direct infringement of copyright. In addition, the issue of infringement liability of Internet service providers due to the infringement of their service providers and the automatic copying of their computer systems in the process of providing services is still in the category of undecided, and needs to be further clarified through legal provisions. The second is indirect infringement, that is, in e-commerce, the tort liability assumed by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) due to the infringement of the user.
When it comes to copyright infringement issues in e-commerce, we need to pay special attention to the infringement of Internet service providers and link infringement issues. Internet service providers are mainly divided into two categories: network content service providers and network intermediary service providers according to the different service contents they provide. Network content service providers refer to the entities that organize information to be disseminated to the public through the Internet. Network content service providers will provide some web pages, and the content on these web pages is stored on the server where the web pages are located. If the content service provided by the network content service provider is not permitted by the copyright owner, it constitutes an infringement of the right to reproduce the work and the right to network dissemination. The basic feature of network intermediary service providers is that they transmit or receive information according to the user’s choice, and they do not organize or screen the information they disseminate. This basic feature determines that they have a different legal status from network content providers in the copyright protection legal system, which makes the infringement liability issues they may bear appear more complicated and more characteristic. In short, in terms of the same-link infringement liability issues on the Internet, the extent of the responsibility that Internet service providers should bear has not been clearly stipulated in the law and is still under discussion.