Limitations of the Myanmar Government in Reforming Copyright Law to Meet Local Author’s Concerns and the Standard of Article 15 (c) of ICESCR
Keywords:
Copyright law reform, Author’s rights, Myanmar Copyright LawAbstract
The government of Myanmar has been re-drafting its copyright law since 2004. It has been doing so for three reasons: to fulfill the required obligations of the TRIPs Agreement of 1994 and the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Intellectual Property Cooperation of 1996, to prevent persistent copyright infringement issues in Myanmar, and to attract foreign direct investment in the creative industry. At the time of this writing a new Copyright Bill is ready to be discussed in Parliament. However, according to a study on the bill and its drafts (Aung, 2017), it will not meet the essential needs of local authors in Myanmar. Thus, this paper will outline the problems of the government in protecting the local authors’moral and material interests. This study uses a qualitative research design. Documentary research and key informant interviews with twenty-four participants were the methods of data gathering. The paper argues that the government’s inability to address local authors’concerns in the revision of the Copyright Bill is due to faulty policy formulation due to the lack of awareness of the subject area among the officials themselves, lack of clear understanding of the issues to be solved, lack of democratic values restricting the participation of affected groups, and insufficient cooperation between related government institutions.
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