Improvement of Copyright Law of Ukraine in the Context of the Experience of EU Member States
Authors: Shtefan Anna 
Published: November 2022

Key words: legislation, legal regulation, copyright, European Union, intellectual property

In Ukraine, the sphere of copyright is regulated by a large number of legislative acts. It includes the Civil Code and the Law ‘On Copyright and Related Rights’ which can be considered as general for relations on the creation and use of works. There are also separate laws on publishing, theater, architecture, media, and other types of activity which are special in the context of legal regulation of certain aspects of copyright in certain areas. Although such a division of legal rules is of certain logic, at the same time, the domestic ramified system of legislative acts is characterized by duplication of similar provisions in different laws and the presence of collisions and therefore is not effective enough.The copyright laws of many EU Member States are based on a structure similar to the Law of Ukraine ‘On Copyright and Related Rights’. At the same time, they differ from it by a higher degree of detail of many provisions. In many Member States, there is a tendency to systematize copyright laws so that they contain all or most of the rules related to the examined area and thus regulate it more fully and comprehensively.In Ukraine, a significant number of such provisions are either stipulated in the legal acts other than the Civil Code and the Law ‘On Copyright and Related Rights’, or are not stipulated at all. In general, copyright laws of many Member States are more systemic in nature.

Some of the approaches adopted in the EU Member States will be useful for reforming the sphere of copyright in Ukraine. This applies, in particular, to specifying the terms of publishing and other contracts in the field of copyright: the general requirements for such contracts are presented in the domestic legislation rather thoroughly but it contains almost no provisions relating to the specific terms of such contracts. In comparison,the Portuguese Code of Copyright and Related Rights includes 24 articles on the publishing contract, and the Italian Law on Copyright and Other Rights Related to its Exercise contains 18 articles regulating such a contract. In Ukraine, there is onlyone general provision stipulating that a publishing contract must be concluded in accordance with the law, and one separate provision concerning the need to specify in the license contract the circulation of the reproduction of a work. The rules on peculiarities of copyright inheritance also deserve attention. There are no such rules in Ukrainian legislation at all, and in practice, there can be quite complex problems that are very difficult to solve due to the gaps in the legal regulation.Therefore, it is advisable to study more deeply the provisions of the domestic legislation of the EU Member States and their experience of legal regulation of copyright relations. This will help to use a more comprehensive and systematic approach to the development of a new edition of the Law ‘On Copyright and Related Rights’ and provide in it the rules necessary to fully and comprehensively regulate the relations on the creation and use of works and protection of relevant rights and interests.