Copyright law of Ainin

The copyright law of Ainin is a series of Acts of Parliament, orders-in-council and common law precedents protecting the intellectual property rights of Aininian and foreign artists in the country. It was first developed in the 16th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, and was applied in the final years of the Glorious Confederation. Copyright was brought back by the Republic in 1798 and has undergone many radical changes over the past 200 years.

They guarantee the right of the artist to sell, publicly exhibit and make derivative works from their art, subject to restrictions in the interest of balancing the rights of the artist with the rights of the general public.

Legislation

A copyright sign identifying a work as being under copyright

Ainin's national copyright law is mostly based on the Copyright and Property Act 1842, which has been amended 26 times since 1842, namely by the following acts:

• Protected Trademarks Act 1843
• Patents and Trade Secrets Act 1851
• Copyright and Property Act 1872
• Aininian Postal Service Reorganisation Act 1880
• National Healthcare Authority Act 1895
• Ministry of Culture Act 1900
• Artistic Property Act 1920
• Radio and Tele-Communications Act 1930
• Television Act 1940
• War Measures Act 1941
• Copyright and Property Act 1946
• Patent Reform Act 1951
• Trademarks and Copyrights Act 1960
• Audio-Visual Recordings Act 1969
• Signals Intelligence Act 1974
• Television Reform Act 1982
• Digital Property Act 1996
• Computing Security Act 1997
• National Information Strategy Act 1997
• Internet Property Act 1998
• Electronic Warfare Act 2001
• Trademarks and Copyrights Act 2005
• Digital Copyright Act 2008
• Patent Reform Act 2010
• Cyberterrorism and Piracy Act 2011
• Copyright Act 2013

Registration

Copyright on a work automatically comes into existence the moment it was created. However, this copyright is largely unenforceable in court due to a lack of solid evidence, so many artists register their works with the Copyright and Property Office in order to secure documents proving the ownership of the work. Copyright over a work gives the author the following rights, subject to restrictions:

• An exclusive right to copy, sell and publicly distribute their work
• An exclusive right to transmit, broadcast, perform or display the work in public
• An exclusive right to create derivative works

Copyright may be registered to more than one person, if there were more than one person that created the work. It can also be registered to a corporation under the doctrine of corporate personhood. The exclusive rights of the author may be sold or surrendered at any time.

Duration of copyright

The standard length of copyright in Ainin is 50 years from the creation of the work, or the lifetime of the author plus 25 years, whichever one is shorter, but there are exceptions. Aininian copyright law applies the rule of the shorter term in regards to foreign works. Prior to 1946, copyright lasted for the lifetime of the author plus 75 years. Works copyrighted prior to 1946 kept the old term until 1982, when the Television Reform Act put all works made until 1946 in the public domain.

Ownership of copyright

In most cases, copyright is owned by the authors of the work, however several major exceptions exist:

• If the author was in the employment of another individual or corporation while producing the work, its copyright belongs to their employer and they forfeit all rights.
• If the work was clearly made as a gift for someone, or otherwise transferred to them, the new owner of the work inherits the copyright as well.
• If the work is sold or otherwise no longer the property of the artist, the copyright is also transferred to the new owner.
• If the work is produced by government employees as part of their job, the copyright belongs to the people of Ainin, meaning that it's de facto public domain.

In all of these cases, the copyright term is not extended, even if the work changed hands.

Restrictions

While copyright covers a large range of works, including dance choreography, photography, film and illustration, and gives many exclusive rights, it is subject to many restrictions regarding its enforcement and is not absolute.

Fair dealing

Fair dealing is a wide-ranging exception to copyright, allowing use of copyrighted works for many non-commercial purposes, namely education, research, criticism and private study, as well as some potentially commercial ones, such as news reporting, satire and parody. The law is very liberal on the matter, also allowing "other reasonable uses" of such works, which the Supreme Court of Ainin has interpreted to include:

• The non-commercial use of audio and visual works for periods up to 20% of the entire collection or footage, or 0:45 of footage, whichever one is shorter.
• The commercial or non-commercial use of under 15% of the total word count of text works (if the work has less than 250 words, the entire text may be quoted unless it is a poem), if it is clearly indicated as a quote and properly cited.
• The commercial use of competitors' copyrighted works in order to make a comparison has been held as legal.

In all of the above cases, claiming that the copyright work was made by the individual employing fair dealing to use the work is illegal.

Uncopyrighteable items

Works with no original content (e.g. a pitch blue square or a poem made by someone else 500 years ago), taken of government employees or based on previously copyrighted works cannot be copyrighted. Neither can adaptions of works in the public domain or those produced by the government or publicly-owned corporations. Speech that is not recorded verbatim by a clerk or recording instrument cannot be copyrighted, nor can works that have since been destroyed or otherwise have ceased to exist. Recordings consisting mostly of another copyrighted work cannot be copyrighted.

Authorised copies

People with copies of the work that were created and distributed with the blessing of the copyright holder have the right to display or play the work in private or closed gatherings as long as they do not claim to have produced it. Whether they can play it in a public gathering remains ambiguous in the law, but most copyright holders do not bother prosecuting such users.

Infringement

Unlike in most countries, copyright infringement is a criminal offence in Ainin, as opposed to a civil wrong. When a copyright holder suspects that their rights have been violated, they must file a complaint with the Copyright and Property Office, which will judge the merits of the case. If they judge the case to be valid, they will forward it to the National Police Copyright Division, which shall lead an investigation, and may recommend state prosecutors to file charges against the violator.

However, unlike other criminal offences, copyright violation has no sentencing guideline at all, and most judges allow first-time offenders to go with a warning, and only apply small fines to repeat offenders. The harshest sentence imposed so far was in 2012 by the Court of the Republic for Forestia, which handed 14-time repeat offender Daniel Martin with a $60,000 fine and 6 years of jail time. The Forestia High Court of Appeals later reduced the sentence to a $50,000 fine and 400 hours of community service, after accounting for time served.

Fines are typically distributed to the copyright holder.