Protection of Copyright Owners & Authors Rights in the Internet: A Comparative Analysis of IP Law in Sri Lanka and European Directives

Abstract

Protection of copyright of original intellectual Creations has become an uphill task under the prevailing highly connected and complicated global environment with the digitalization and the internet. This paper scrutinizes the effectiveness of the copyright protection of the current legal regime in Sri Lanka in a comparative analysis with the European Union Directives in order to seek the answer for the research gap to conclude whether the Sri Lankan Intellectual Property (IP) regime is sufficient to safeguard the rights of the copyright owners and authors with the rapid involvement of the internet. This study is expedient due to lack of investigation in the Sri Lankan academia. The exploration rested on secondary sources and data was analyzed by a qualitative approach. Materials included national and international legislation, academic and media data. The study stood on the comparative legal analysis, integrated legal interpretation and modeling. In addition to that, key informants in the field were interviewed as a supplementary primary source of information. The research findings suggest the free riders are exploiting the existing loopholes of the legal systems and law enforcement areas. Therefore, a special emphasis should be paid to the protection of intellectual property rights on the internet. The article identifies major approaches in legislation and practice on EU regulations and explores a number of current options: IP enforcement as a harmonized and regulated or not regulated by separate rules of law, Digital Single Market etc. The research findings laid grounds for preliminary recommendations on legal drafting with regard to IP status as that of harmonized and autonomous legal personality. It could be concluded that the Sri Lankan IP Legislation consist of many lope holes to safe guard their copyright of the Owners and Authors due to the territorial nature of enforcement, lack of harmonization and lack of proper regulations and awareness. In order to prevent those problems, it is suggested various options such as development and amendments of the national legislation, introduce IT-IP regulations, introduction of the data privacy Act etc. further research could be recommended to discover the challenges for IP law in artificial Intelligence.