Thursday, November 04, 2010

How To Get The Copyright When You Commission a Work in China?

Xu Hui-Meng of the Henan University of Finance and Economics, Zhengzhou, wrote in May of 2010 the article: 'The research on the nature of the agreement of the ownership of the copyright of the commissioned works' for the Journal of Guangxi Administrative Cadre Institute of Politics and Law (广西政法管理干部学院学报), volume 25, number 3.

Abstract:
"The copyright of commissioned works [has] important contract terms. The nature of the ownership of copyright agreement is related to the client to obtain the copyright, the trustee obligations and the balance of the interests of both sides. The client gets the copyright through the commissioned works contract that is called achieving by the following. As a result of the invisible works and lack of copyright registration system , the Trustee fulfills his obligation by the legal presumption of copyright transfer. The transfer of the copyright happens with the creation of the commissioned works. The writing contract of the Commissioned works often becomes public means of copyright transfer. Payment from the client and the copyright transfer from the trustee constitute the consideration that impacts copyright transfer."

Read Xu's article here (pdf in Chinese). Picture Danny Friedmann, Yangshuo, Guangxi Province.

2 comments:

Rogier said...

Very interesting topic this, but when will the Chinese learn how to NOT write "the" before every word? Wouldn't "Research on the Nature of Copyright Ownership Agreements over Commissioned Works" (a) suffice and (b) be much more intelligible?

IP Dragon said...

Hi Rogier,

Thanks for "the" comment ;-) I guess to know when to use the definite article is quite hard when you are used to classifiers, which might be hard for people who have no problem with the definite article.

Found a nice list of classifiers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers.

Cheers,
Danny