I had the honor of presenting the latest updates to our User Rights Database at the 18th annual Congress of the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues. I include here some new analysis of our data released for the first time at SERCI, ranking the countries in our study and categorizing them based on whether they have a civil or common law tradition.
Mike Palmedo and I have been working on a project the last several years to create a User Rights Database mapping the change in copyright exceptions from 1970 to 2016 in a basket of wealthy and developing countries. The following chart, released for the first time at SERCI, ranks the countries in our study from the most to the least “open” in their copyright user rights. I include identifiers for their level of development, the strength of their copyright protections, and whether their law has a civil or common law tradition. The open score is taken from the User Rights Database for the last year studied – 2016 – for each country. The strength of copyright score is taken from Walter Park and Tad Reynolds’, Copyright Index.
USER RIGHTS DATABASE
| Rank | Country | Open Score | (c) Stength | Law Type | Development |
| 1 | USA | 2.69737 | Common | High | |
| 2 | Korea | 2.27632 | 3.89 | Civil | High |
| 3 | Singapore | 2.02632 | Civil | High | |
| 4 | Portugal | 1.94737 | 3.48 | Civil | High |
| 5 | Japan | 1.81579 | 3.7 | Civil | High |
| 6 | Switzerland | 1.77632 | 3.61 | Civil | High |
| 7 | India | 1.64474 | 2.27 | Common | Low |
| 8 | Chile | 1.61972 | Civil | High | |
| 9 | Slovakia | 1.61842 | 2.78 | Civil | Mid |
| 10 | Brazil | 1.60526 | 3.18 | Civil | Mid |
| 11 | Australia | 1.57333 | 3.44 | Common | High |
| 12 | China | 1.5 | 3.12 | Civil | Mid |
| 12 | Netherlands | 1.5 | 3.58 | Civil | High |
| 14 | Ukraine | 1.34211 | Civil | Mid | |
| 15 | Finland | 1.33571 | 3.75 | Civil | High |
| 16 | Vietnam | 1.12162 | Civil | Low | |
| 17 | Peru | 1.07895 | Civil | Low | |
| 18 | South Africa | 1.01316 | Common | Mid | |
| 19 | Colombia | 0.960526 | Civil | Mid | |
| 20 | Botswana | 0.434211 | Common | Low | |
| 21 | Argentina | 0.118421 | Civil | Mid |
The ranking helps identify a couple insights from our study.
One important lesson from our data is that you do not have to be a common law country with a “fair dealing” or “fair use” right to support open exceptions. Of the top 10 most open exceptions environments in our study, only two are common law countries. Openness in exceptions can be achieved in traditional civil law systems if the purposes of exceptions are crafted broadly and made applicable to the maximum possible range of works, activities, and users. This finding supports research by Teresa Nobre who uses the example of civil law countries like Czech Republic as model examples of open and flexible education exceptions that are fit for the digital environment.
There is a correlation between having stronger copyright protection and having more open exceptions. This may be a reflection for how often a given country’s law has reformed. Where law reform takes place, a balance may be sought be to be struck between rights and exceptions, leading to the broadening of exceptions while rights and enforcement are increased. But there are exceptions. Colombia and Argentina are examples of countries with relatively strong rights protection, but very narrow exceptions environments.
The idea that developing countries adopt broad exceptions to free ride on the production of the wealthy countries is not supported by our data. All of the most restrictive countries in our database are developing countries; all the most open countries are wealthy ones.
The data from our User Rights Database and links to our published analysis is available at http://infojustice.org/survey
