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Intellectual Property and Commercial Court

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2008 Xing Zhi Shang Yi No. 76

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Decision No. 2008 2008 Xing Zhi Shang Yi No. 76
Date April 23, 2009
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According to Article 3, Paragraph 1, Subparagraph 1 of the Copyright Act, a “work” protected by the Copyright Act means a creation that is within a literary, scientific, artistic, or other intellectual domain. Except for the works listed in Article 9 of the Copyright Act, a work is protected by the Copyright Act if it has originality and can be expressed physically by words, languages, images, or other media so as to be a creation within a literary, scientific, artistic, or other intellectual domain. In terms of general interpretation, “originality” includes “origin” and “creativity.” “Origin” means that an author independently finishes his creation that is not a copying or is not acquired though piracy. “Creativity” means that a creation should reach a certain level of integrity and sufficiently express the personality and ideology of the author. Moreover, according to Article 7, if a work formed by the creative selection and arrangement of materials is of creativity, it shall be protected as an independent work. If a compilation work meets the above statutory requirement, it will be a protected subject matter. That is, such compilation work must meet the requirements of a copyrightable work, and in addition to creativity it must have origin, which means that the author must independently finish his work without copying other works. Here, the disputed problems in Petitioner’s work as shown in Appendix 1 are eighty eight to one hundred percent similar to the problems collected in the early work. Or, the disputed arrangement is based on the problems selected from prior different works, and was edited though the curriculum. The way of such arrangement is well known to the general workers in such field and often practiced thereby. The arrangement has no special meaning, and has no origin and creativity, as mentioned above, so as to meet no requirement of a compilation work and, therefore, to enjoy no copyright protection. Thus, although two Defendants here re-typed and edited/arranged the disputed problems for use without a permission of Petitioner, that is not a copyright violation of Article 91, Paragraph 1 that criminalizes infringers against a right to reproduce, which is a copyright property crime.

Related Provision Copyright Act: Art. 3; Art. 9; Art. 91, Para. 1
  • Release Date:2020-11-13
  • Update:2020-12-03
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