Quick Berne Convention Overview

Background

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works is an international treaty that refers to the concept and necessity of providing for an international copyright regulations and statutes. The Berne Convention was developed by Victor Hugo and was accepted and enacted into legislation in 1886 in Berne, Switzerland, which lends the convention its name.

The inception of the Berne Convention was born out the necessity for the ability of copyright legislation and regulations to be able to be interpreted and applied at an international level, and most importantly, between countries. Before the Convention, countries would often refuse to recognize foreign copyright of works, and reproduced and distributed such works freely.

Many countries had and still have their own legislation regarding copyrights and wanted to impose their native laws upon those works on foreign soil. An all-governing international law was needed to regulate such instances and protect the copyrights of works and materials and their respective authors or owners.

Content

The Berne Convention would have at is core three basic principles regarding the regulation of international copyright laws and protection. These basic principles are modeled on the basis of simplicity and minimal restrictions, so as to be adhered to without incident by all of the nations or countries in accordance with the Convention.

The first principle is basically that all countries will respect foreign copyrights and treat them as they do with their national copyrighted works. The second states that copyrights are inherent based on the creation of work and are not subject to registration or application for copyright to be for those rights and protection to be recognized.

The third simply provides for an explanation regarding a term of protection instituted by the Convention. Aside from the three basic principles, the Berne Convention delineates basic rights to be observed of all copyrighted material and their authors or owners.

United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property

The United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property would be the Committee created by the Berne Convention to handle all of the administrative duties that would coincide with the new international copyright legislation.

It would combine offices with a similar Committee born out of the Paris Convention in order to facilitate their coinciding efforts. BIRPI, as it is most commonly referred, was established in 1960. Today, BIRPI exists under a different moniker, the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, and has been officially integrated as an organization under the United NationsConvention.

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