International Copyright
Copyright law is different in various countries, both in its justification and in the specifics. The US uses an economic justification for copyright. Other countries have other bases for their copyright laws, and many countries also recognize "moral rights" of creators. Several countries and organizations attempt to standardize copyright law internationally.
Below is a list of organizations, treaties and agreements that have significant influence on US copyright law.
-The Berne Convention For the Protection of Artistic and Literary Works, (Berne Convention)
-The World Trade Organization (WTO) and its General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) with the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) section
-The United Nations (UN) and its World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with its Copyright Treaty.
These are international treaties and agreements that in part standardize copyright law internationally and provide copyright enforcement of works created in different countries. So, a work created abroad has the same protection in the US as a US work would have.
Let's talk a little bit about moral rights. These rights are specific rights some countries give to creators, and like copyright, cover a wide spectrum of rights. Recall how copyright in the US was created based on the utilitarian view of copyright. Moral rights in copyright law are an expression of viewing creator rights as natural rights. The actual rights differ from country to country, but the Berne Convention recognizes the right of integrity and the right of attribution.The right of integrity protects an author's work from mutilation or distortion and protects the work from association with something that would harm the creator's reputation. The right of attribution refers to the author's right to be associated with his or her work (and the work not attributed to someone else). When the US joined the Berne Convention, the Senate Report on the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (Senate Report 100-352) stated that moral rights protections, although not explicitly defined as such under then existing US law, were covered in the US by defamation law, common law of unfair competition, and the Lanham Act (on trademarks), which among other things prohibits the "false designation of origin of materials." However, the US did pass the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) to give limited moral protection to certain types of creations.
Many countries do not have "fair use," per se, but have equivalents written into their laws. A popular term is "fair dealing."
Also, interestingly enough, different countries treat copyright enforcement differently. In Japan, for example, a thriving manga (comics) industry exists. Manga in Japan is different in some ways than manga in the US. It has a much broader audience across a wide age spectrum. However, Japan also has a thriving doujinshi industry. Doujinshi are essentially "fan created" comics, and a very large number of them are considered derivative works. The doujinshi industry is open and huge, and most manga stores also sell doujinshi, with no stigma, with the full knowledge of the creators. It's a commonly expressed belief that the doujinshi industry can help the sale of the original works. When in Tokyo my wife and I stopped at several stores, and one manga store near Akihabara had two floors dedicated to manga, and four floors that sold only doujinshi.
An odd thing is that Japan, in many ways, has much stricter copyright law than in the US. I was glad to see Lawrence Lessig write about the doujinshi industry in his latest book, Free Culture. However, he attributes the thriving doujinshi industry to one element in particular: the scarcity of lawyers.
Here's an example. Several years ago there was a popular manga and anime series entitled Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, which was eventually brought to America. This image is the cover of one of the thousands and thousands of Japanese fan produced works related to the series.
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