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The purpose of this paper is to summarize the current Korean copyright law and its effect on electronic document delivery services in Korea, and to recommend solutions for Korean libraries and information centers.

The authors present information based on their own professional experience at a national document supply center.

Korean libraries have five options for pursuing copyright clearance for materials published outside of Korea: negotiate an agreement directly with publishers; establish an agreement with, and pay royalties to, copyright collectives; establish bilateral treaties with national copyright collectives; establish a framework agreement with the organizations representing copyright holders; and incorporate extended collective licensing into the Korean copyright law.

The Korean copyright law was amended in 2011 and this paper presents the most current research on the law's impact on electronic document delivery services in Korea.

Following an overview of the historical context of copyright legislation, this paper discusses copyright within the scholarly communication process and the role of libraries in providing access to copyright materials in the digital age. The argument is made that the balance of “rights” and “exceptions” that has been maintained for 300 years needs to be reconsidered for scholarly communications, such as theses and dissertations, as well as for articles in electronic journals. This type of information is fact‐based, often resulting from public funds, and is part of the intellectual heritage of academic institutions, and so is very different to creative works within the entertainment industries.

In recent decades, the reproduction of copyrighted materials has become a subject of controversy, due in large part to the advent of photocopiers. Legislators, authors, publishers, educators, and librarians often differ in their interpretations of copyright law. In this article, Jean E. Koch explains the Copyright Revision Act of 1976 and illuminates the debate over its meaning.

The underlying concern of copyright is with communication; the purpose of the copyright system as it exists today is to stimulate those who have something to communicate—ideas, information, visions—to express them in a form in which they can be communicated to other human beings. The copyright system seeks to encourage authors to write, musicians to compose, artists to paint, and to provide incentives for the dissemination of their output by giving them rights of control over the use to which these forms of expression—literature, music, visual art—may be put by the public. The copyright law today is entirely statutory, subject, of course, to judicial interpretation as and when disputes come before the courts. The present statute is the Copyright Act 1956; its principal effect may be summarised in the following way:

This column aims to look at the results of the US Copyright Office's request for comments about orphan copyrights.

It uses a form of Game Theory called the Prisoner's Dilemma Game to analyze the comments that are available on the Copyright Office web site.

Some change seems likely, if only because the opponents of change may discover that they can gain more for themselves when they stop defending the interests of those who have abandoned their copyrights already.

If some form of cooperation between intellectual property consumers and rights holders could be worked out for orphan copyrights, it might lead to further “tit‐for‐tat” reactions that help to address other copyright issues.

Provides useful information on orphan copyrights.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legal issues of simultaneous Internet transmission of broadcasting programs of the Open University of Japan (OUJ) and to take legal measures to promote the mutual utilization of open university courses in Japan, the UK, China and Korea.

The author examines the legal relationship regarding Internet simultaneous distribution of broadcast courses at the OUJ. The author then considers the legal relationship between the UK, China and South Korea regarding the simultaneous transmission of broadcast courses over the internet. Based on that consideration, this paper clarifies legal measures to promote its utilization.

Internet transmission of broadcasting courses will be webcasting. Arguably, it can be assumed to be streaming and on-demand, albeit controversial. Webcasting will be publicly transmitted, but there is only an on-demand provision for Internet transmission. As webcasting is streaming and on-demand, it involves reproduction of broadcasting courses. Therefore, webcasting needs to provide streaming provision for public transmission rights and associate them with reproduction right.

The originality of this paper lies in clarifying the legal response of the object, subject and rights of webcasting from the perspective of the OUJ, in order to dispel legal problems that may arise in the future against this unexplored phenomenon. Additionally, this paper is valuable in that it presents legal consistency from the point of view of the comparative laws of Japan, the UK, China and South Korea, based on an examination of the legal response in Japan.

This paper aims to attempt to provide an overview of the copyright legal framework for audiovisual resources in Europe and Greece, how Audiovisual (AV) content is currently licensed by Greek providers and how licenses or copyright exceptions enable its reuse. The motivation for this work was the development of an aggregation service for audiovisual resources in Greece, the Open AudioVisual Archives (OAVA) platform.

Copyright licenses and exceptions in the European Union and in Greek Legislation have been thoroughly reviewed along with the reuse of content, based on the terms of Fair Use, Rights Statements and Creative Commons. Licensing issues for the most well-known aggregation services, such as Europeana, Digital Public Library of America, Trove, Digital New Zealand and the National Digital Library of India, have also been studied and considered. Audiovisual content providers in Greece have been recorded, and their licensing preferences have been analyzed. Pearson’s chi-square test was applied to test the relationship between the provider’s type, resources’ genre and licenses used.

Despite the abundance of copyright legislation in the European Union and in Greece, audiovisual content providers in Greece seem to ignore it or find it difficult to choose the right license. More than half of them choose to publish their resources on popular audiovisual platforms using the default licensing option provided. Creative Commons licenses are preferred for audiovisual content that falls into the following categories: open courses (almost exclusively) and interviews and digital collection/research projects (about half of the content).

This paper examines audiovisual content aggregation, in the EU and Greece, from a legal point of view. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first attempt to record and analyze the licensing preferences of Greek AV content providers.

To extract the full potential from internet‐wide knowledge sharing and reuse, the underlying copyright issues must be taken into account and managed using digital rights management (DRM) tools. The paper aims to focus on the issues involved.

Traditional DRM and open licensing initiatives lack the required computerised support and flexibility to scale to internet‐wide copyright management. Our approach is based on a semantic web ontology that conceptualises the copyright domain.

The Copyright Ontology facilitates interoperation while providing a rich framework that accommodates copyright law and copes with custom licensing schemes.

The ontology is based on the description logic variant of the Web Ontology Language. Despite its scalability, this variant has some limitations on expression that will be overcome with the help of semantic web rules in future versions of the ontology.

The ontology provides the building blocks for flexible machine‐understandable licenses and facilitates implementation because existing semantic web tools can be easily reused. Moreover, existing initiatives can be mapped to the ontology to make it an interoperability hub.

The paper contributes a novel approach to DRM, based on semantic web technologies, that takes into account the underlying copyright legal framework. This is possible thanks to the greater expressiveness of semantic web knowledge representation tools.

This paper aims to point out the vital role an effective regulatory regime can play in any sector of a nation's economy.

The paper uses the regulatory mandate of the Nigerian Copyright Commission on the Nigerian copyright‐based industries as an example.

The paper underscores the vital role of an effective regulatory regime in facilitating the growth, development and crisis prevention in any sector of a nation's economy.

The paper advocates an adoption of an effective regulatory regime to prevent a reoccurrence of the global financial crisis.

This paper aims to show how the European Commission is seeking to solve the problems of market fragmentation and inaccessibility of copyright content in the Digital Single Market. The analysis draws on a still unresolved conflict between the enforcement of national copyright titles and the European Union (EU) policy objective to ensure pan-European access to copyright works.

First, the paper focuses on the causal relationship between national copyright systems and the existing territorial partitions in the online content markets. Second, the paper reviews the piecemeal approach followed by the Commission in its recent legislative initiative aimed at ensuring the cross-border “portability” of online content services. Third, the paper points out how a much more radical approach the Commission has undertaken in an ongoing antitrust case against the territorial partitions created by major film producers and the biggest EU broadcasters might revisit the principle of copyright’s territoriality.

In particular, the paper explains why the application of Article 101 TFEU with regard to the licensing agreements creating areas of absolute territorial exclusivity might have potentially disruptive effects on the existing models of online distribution. While pointing out that this outcome will largely depend on how the ongoing antitrust case will be settled, the paper concludes that the liberalization of so-called “passive sales” might force content owners and broadcasters (or content suppliers) to re-structure markets for online content and to replace territoriality with other criteria that might help them differentiate their offerings and packages.

The modernization of copyright rules that the Juncker Commission has advocated since the start of its mandate aims to ensure that consumers can access services, music, movies and sporting events on their electronic devices wherever they are in Europe and regardless of borders. In May 2015, this pledge was transposed in the first pillar of the Commission Communication “A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe”. In particular, the Commission announced its intention to propose, before the end of 2015, legislation to reduce differences and friction between national copyright regimes and prevent “unjustified” geo-blocking. In parallel, DG Competition of the European Commission in its capacity as antitrust authority is conducting a formal antitrust investigation aimed to examine whether territorial licensing agreements concluded by several US film studios with the largest European pay-tv broadcasters could be regarded as incompatible with Article 101 TFEU. For the first time, a paper aims to compare the expected outcome of the ongoing reform of the EU copyright framework vis-à-vis the potential outcome of the antitrust investigation led by DG Competition and identify the pros and cons of the two approaches followed by the Commission.