Anglo-American vs. Continental approach to IP

There are two main reasons for intellectual property law. Firstly, the IT should protect the interest of authors/creators of work by giving them property rights over their creations. The second reason should think on society – Intellectual property should encourage inventors to open their ideas for the society, which can gather from it.

Basically, there are two school of intellectual property law – Continental and Anglo-American. Both have some both similar features and also differences. The Anglo-American approach focuses mostly on the work and profit. As Kiado quoted Samuels - We don’t have to pay all authors in advance in order to get them to create their works. Instead, we pay them in rights - rights in the very works that they create. This sentence nicely describes Anglo-American school and may be some American character as well. In his school are authors given all rights to their work art for their whole life of author plus seventy years. Notice of copyright and publication aren’t required, because there is a presumption of protection.

There are two major exceptions to presumption of copyright. The first of them is a public domain, which is applied after the expiration of author’s rights and also US Government documents are under the public domain – anybody can copy and print them without permission. Fair use exception is need for maximization social wealth in the field of information. According to this law is possible to use for instance parts of text and images on the internet, if you quote or link them back to the source. In my opinion, you can´t earn money on it – Fair use doesn’t include this condition.

Both European continental and Anglo-American schools of IP protects expressions of ideas, but not ideas as such, in several ways: Inventions (patent) writings (copyright), trademarks, trade secrets, and most recently designs and models, using similar legal mechanisms.1 In the contrary, continental civil law considers intellectual property from a perspective of the author’s moral rights, so rather than social wealth the focus in Europe is on the integrity of the person.

I am not sure, which of these systems is better working, so I hope that the international law took from both their better parts.

1 Engle, Eric. When is Fair Use Fair? Online: http://lexnet.bravepages.com/IPMASTER.htm#A.