In Comparative Digital Copyright Law, authors Péter Mezei, Dóra Hajdú, Luis Javier Capote-Pérez and Jie Qin address key aspects of copyright law in a digital age. The selected topics cover issues related to the existence and the exercise of copyrights related to various subject matters, especially focusing on software, audio and audio-visual contents. The textbook serves as a primary selection of leading European, American and Chinese case law related to software rights, communication to the public, P2P file-sharing, cultural preservation, exhaustion and sampling. This book is geared towards law students of European, American and Chinese universities, but it might also serve as a useful tool for researchers and practitioners to understand the core similarities and differences of the copyright law of the discussed jurisdictions. The authors also intend to provoke and encourage deeper thinking on these topics by various questions and notes, and to support comparative research by listing other leading case law and academic resources.
Péter Mezei is an associate professor of law and the deputy head of the Institute of Comparative Law and Legal Theory, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, University of Szeged. He is an adjunct professor (dosentti) of the University of Turku, Finland. He is a member of the Hungarian Copyright Expert Board. He is the author of over 120 publications. He has held lectures on comparative digital copyright law at universities in Finland, France, the United States of America, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy over 60 times since 2007. He prepared the national report for the 18th International Congress of Comparative Law (2010) on the limitations and exceptions in Hungarian copyright law and he co-authored the national report for the 19th International Congress of Comparative Law (2014) on license contracts, free software and Creative Commons. He has participated in several research projects commissioned and financed by the Hungarian Copyright Forum Association, the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office, and the European Commission. He is the founder of the leading Hungarian copyright blog (www.copy21.com).
Dóra Hajdú defended her PhD thesis on copyright law in 2016 in a joint program between the University of Szeged (Hungary) and the Paris-Saclay University (France). She has successfully passed the French bar exam and recently started to work as an intellectual property in-house counsel at a major software development company. Author of a book analysing author's exclusive rights exercised collectively and several articles, she contributes to the Copy21 blog.
Luis Javier Capote-Pérez is a Lecturer in Private Law at the University of La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of La Laguna. His research interests include tourism, Land Register, family law, cultural and intellectual property and gender perspective of private law. Professor Capote-Pérez is a member of many university institutions, like Cultural Cathedra "Francisco Tomás y Valiente" or "Radio Campus" - the oldest university radio station in Spain - of the University of La Laguna. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the "Santander Art and Culture Law Review" and of UNESCO Cultural Chair "Cultural Property Law" of the University of Opole. He has been Acting Judge at the Appellation Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife since 2006. He works also in the area of divulgation, acting as a member of the Scientific Divulgation Cultural Chair of the University of La Laguna and creating many materials for legal divulgation. Some of these materials are available in audiovisual format in ULLMedia, the YouTube channel of the University of La Laguna.
