Newsletter
COPYRIGHT AND AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA RENTALS
In a recent legal interpretation, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) noted that some movies sold on optical disk are divided into editions for direct sale to the public and editions for rental, with the public sale edition bearing text prohib-iting its rental. However, the Copyright Act provides that the owner of an original or a lawful copy of a work other than a sound recording or a computer program may hire out such an original or copy, without further permission from the owner of the economic rights in the work. Therefore, if the public sale edition of a movie optical disk is offered for distribution and sale in the market, then even if it bears prohibition against its rental, purchasers of the movie optical disk (including consumers and rental operators) may still rent out the movie optical disk without infringing copyright, based on their ownership of the disk. Issuing separate editions for public performance and for rental is a lawful business model that may be practiced by owners of eco-nomic rights in audiovisual works, but they cannot use the issuance of a public sale edition to restrict the right of the owner of an optical disk to hire the disk out.
The IPO also stated that when copyright in a movie on optical media is infringed, under the Copyright Act only an exclusive licensee may enforce its rights and institute legal proceedings with the same status as the owner of the eco-nomic rights. In practice the courts have also taken the view that a nonexclusive licensee dif-fers from an exclusive licensee in that it does not enjoy exclusive economic rights in the work, and therefore is not the victim of a crime when in-fringement occurs. As such, it may not file a criminal complaint or bring a private prosecution. Accordingly, if an overseas company licenses a Taiwanese agent to publish a movie on optical media, then unless the agent is an exclusive li-censee it may not bring an action in its own right against an infringer of copyright in the movie, even if it has obtained a censor certificate for the movie on optical media from the Government Information Office.