This is the outline of my talk at Berkman Fellow’s Hour on 17 Nov. 2009. Needs improvement, just post for commentaries.

1. Copyright protection is justified in a utilitarian way in the US. Contrary to many people’s granted thought, my study find that although it is deeply affected by the Germeneric-japanese form of civil code system, China’s current copyright law is also based on utilitarian philosophy.

2. Pros and cons of the utilitarian justification to the copyright law, as well as some of cyberspace law.

Advantage: that’s the sourse of various thinking to the legal reform.
Disadvantage: when the understandings of “progress” (US Constitution Art. 8; China’s Constitution Art. 19, 20, 47, Copyright Law Art. 1) in different countries conflict with each other, conflicts of the law will be inrooted and hard to be coherent.

3. When the US is a giant but China is a dawf in the matters of either economy or civilization, US can impose its understanding of “progress” and the corresponding detailed copyright law to China, as it has been for many years. While if China becomes a giant also, what will happen? No matter how do people celebrate it or demonize it based upon different values/ideologies, the unique “socialist regime with Chinese characteristics” is an existence, and has developed a more and more complicated legal system.

4. The first formal head-on confrontation happened at the WTO dispute on the provision of denying copyright protection to the “illegal works” (either content-illegal or procedure-unlawful) in China’s copyright act.

5. There is a trend of the isolation of the Internet. The isolated and respectively utilitarianized legal system may enlarge the differences of copyright/information law among countris in future. (example (1) firewalled but flourishing Chinese “Intranet”; example (2) differentiated treatment to the books in the latest Google book settlement because of the needs to comply with the territorial copyright law).

6. What would be a uniform legal justification for the future reformed copyright law (or law on “creation in commons”)? Or, in what level, that justification is possiblly uniformed in such a utilitarian world?