Conclusion.

AuthorBarbosa, Roberto Garza
PositionTerritorial nature of copyrights - International Copyright Law and Litigation: A Mechanism for Improvement

Copyright and neighboring rights exist because there is a public purpose behind them. This public purpose is derived from the will of each country's legislature to promote the creation of useful works. (271) For the purposes of this Article, it has been assumed that this is the best justification for copyright law. However, the proposed mechanism is applicable whatever normative justification is taken.

The territorial nature of copyrights has led to the development of international treaties containing national treatment principles and minimum standards of protection. Those international treaties were written, not because there is a natural universal copyright, but because those conventions were useful for achieving the basic principle and purpose of copyright: the promotion of new works. By protecting foreign works, Member States promote the creation of new works because local authors do not have to compete with cheaper unprotected foreign works. The harmonization through international treaties has done most of the work needed to establish effective copyright protection. However, the most important efforts of harmonization were done before the digital age. The legal development now needs to overcome procedural problems caused by new technology to copyright holders--necessitating the improvement of international litigation.

The barrier of physical distance between countries has been broken with the digital age. A mechanism is necessary that is based on established principles that can now be applied to the new problems created by technology. Even though this proposal offers three paths, in case the first and most important fails, the core of the proposal is an international treaty for the enforcement of copyright judgments.

(271.) The most important philosophical approaches or normative justifications for copyright law are: instrumentalism or utilitarianism, natural rights based principally on Locke, and moral rights based on Kant and Hegel. Both utilitarian and natural rights justifications are present mostly...

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