COPYRIGHT LAW’S FIRST SALE DOCTRINE IN CYBERSPACE

• Main Authors: Shih-Fang Chiu, 邱詩芳
• Other Authors: Ming-Li Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12413017815063813646

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 產業經濟研究所 === 103 === The first sale doctrine is a legal concept playing an important role in copyright law. By limiting copyright owner’s distribution right, the doctrine makes copyrighted works be freely disposed, increasing opportunities and ways of accessing information for people, improving transfer of knowledge, and then facilitate to achieve the ultimate goal of copyright law that encourage creation and cultural development. That is, the first sale doctrine helps to balance the interests between copyright owner and the public. The first sale doctrine is well established in physical world, but there are some problems when the doctrine applies to cyberspace. First, the first sale doctrine does not apply to intangible works. Second, due to the ease with which digital works can be copied and distributed, copyright owners began to employ license agreement to replace the actual sale in order to circumvent the application of the first sale doctrine. Whether or not the first sale doctrine applies to cyberspace was well discussed over the past few years. According to the current rules and practices in the world, the answer is not. However, the spirit of copyright law which encourages creation and cultural development should not be changed due to the improvement of technology. Therefore, it is improper to exclude the intangible works from applying first sale doctrine merely base on its characteristics of intangible goods. One of aims of this research is trying to establish the necessity which first sale doctrine could apply to the intangible works, and solving the problem that the first sale doctrine does not apply to the intangible works in both architectural and legal methods. The other aim of this research is trying to establish a standard to identify the nature of license agreement is “license” or “sale”, and trying to apply copyright misuse doctrine to avoid copyrighted owners circumvent the application of the first sale doctrine via license agreement.