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Publication

Politics in Publishing - Japan and the Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, 1890s-1970

Book - Dissertation

On April 18, 1899 Japan accessed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works that had been established in 1886 by a federation of mainly European states upon demand from various authors' and publishers' associations. Once the treaty was concluded, the international Bureau of the Berne Union aimed for a global expansion of its treaty thus beginning efforts to gain more members and further extend the protection of rights. The history behind this globalization of international copyright norms has been mainly told within a European context and from a state-centric perspective. In this view, other actors including private interest groups were to a large part ignored, focus placed instead on the core founding states of the Convention and the involved state actors. By contrast, this dissertation focuses on the role of Japan and highlights the complex interaction among Japan's publishing industry, its legal scholars, and the state in the globalization of intellectual property rights between the late 1890s and 1970. It argues that Japan's participation was largely shaped by the input of extra-governmental actors who with the help of petitions and via the forum of advisory councils successfully advised the ministerial bureaucracy, and thereby the involved international organizations, including the League of Nations and later UNESCO, in the ongoing negotiations. A global history of copyright cannot be explained apart from the non-governmental actors who until the postwar era were absent in a direct sense from the international revision conferences of the Berne Convention and thus practically invisible on the world stage. However, it was precisely these actors who initiated Japan's opposition movement and who remained closely entangled with the ministerial bureaucrats throughout the lengthy process of aligning the country's laws with those of the international community. By analyzing the Berne Convention's various international revision conferences and their transnational planning process, this thesis brings to light the large network behind Japan's involvement in the globalization of international copyright and thereby contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of national and international policy-making and how this became reflected in legal norms.
Publication year:2020
Accessibility:Closed