Revision is made every ten years

During the first decade of reform and opening up thirty years ago, China had no copyright law and did not enter into any international copyright conventions, China and foreign countries were not legally obliged to protect the copyrights of each other's works.Márquez,the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Colombian Nobel Prize winner of 1982,visited China in October 1990.He witnessed the sale of his works in bookstores.Due in no small part to the piracy and no royalty payment,he immediately indicated that he would not authorize the copyright to Chinese publishers.At that time,China's Copyright Law had just been promulgated and had not come into force, and China had not entered into any international copyright convention and was not obliged to protect foreign works.The claims of Márquez were legally groundless.This is the copyright protection status of China 30 years ago.

From the late 1980s to 1990s, during multiple governmental negotiations between China and the United States,the United States insisted that China should provide comprehensive protection to its intellectual property rights.Eventually,the provision on mutual protection of intellectual property rights was added to the Agreement on Trade Relations Between China and the United States.Under such background,China accelerated the formulation of the Copyright Law.China's first Copyright Law was enacted on 7 September 1990 and came into force on 1 June 1991.In 1992,China entered into the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Universal Copyright Convention.(https://www.daowen.com)

For the sake of accession to the World Trade Organization(WTO),specialized intellectual property laws in China should be in conformity with the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and meanwhile be capable of coping with challenges resulting from the development of new technologies.On 27 October 2001,the NPC Standing Committee (hereinafter referred to as the NPCSC)revised the Copyright Law for the first time.That revision involved many provisions with lots of highlights,which, among other things, include： listing acrobatics and architectural works as statutory types of works, elevating a collective copyright management clause in the Implementing Regulations of the Copyright Law into the law and stipulating the basic principles of the collective copyright management system for the first time, adding an important right of information network dissemination,removing a restriction on the ten-year exclusive right of publication, stipulating the“statutory licensing”system of textbooks,and identifying the statutory damages amount and adopting preliminary injunction.The first revised Copyright Law played an important role in adjusting copyright creation, utilization, management and protection after China's accession to the WTO,and boosted the development of copyright protection and copyright undertakings in China.

On 26 February 2010,the NPCSC made the second revision of the Copyright Law in a bid to implement the WTO's rulings concerning the intellectual property disputes between China and the United States.In the second revision,only one and a half provisions were amended,that is,the first half of Article 4“works of which publication and dissemination are prohibited according to law shall not enjoy the protection under this Law”was amended to “the State shall supervise and manage the publication and dissemination of works according to law”and became the second half of that Article, and Article 26 was added, which states that“in case of a pledge over copyright,the pledger and pledgee shall register the pledge with the copyright management department under the State Council”.