The Exhaustion Doctrine of Intellectual Property Right- Issue on Copyright

• Main Authors: Tai-Chia Chung, 鍾岱珈
• Other Authors: Kuo-Hua Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/76828919268053369004

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 科技法律研究所 === 102 === "The exhaustion doctrine", that is, " the first sale doctrine" refers to with the authorized products first entered into a circulation market, the right owners’ rights will disappeared. This article will focus on the research on exhaustion of digital works issues; however, digital works can be divided into two categories – tangible products and intangible products. The tangible digital works, such as digital video discs (abbreviated as DVDs). In Taiwan, there exist many controversial problems on the application of exhaustion doctrine in DVDs: for instance, does the DVDs of ”parallel imports” be able to lease or sale again? And which action of “rental exclusive use edition DVDs” is – “authorization” or “sale”? These disputes have plagued our courts in practice for a long time, it is not just the disagreements between superior courts and lower courts, even supreme courts, themselves, have inconsistent opinions. Because these controversies involve not only the interests of copyright owners but also concern the defendants would constitute the copyright infringements and whether there is any criminal responsibility, it has wide impacts and that is why it is worth profound discussion. The intangible digital works, for example, E-books. According to the statistics from United Kingdom Amazon bookstore, E-books’ sale volume goes well beyond paper-books in 2010. It can be seen that E-books will be a mainstream tendency of reading. Hence, this article will discuss specifically on whether E-books can apply to the first sale doctrine.