CHOICE OF LAW - AN UNRESOLVED QUESTION IN THE FIRST ADULT VIDEO COPYRIGHT CASE OF THE TAIWAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COURT

On February 20, 2014, the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court ('TIPC') issued its first adult video copyright case, Taiwan Intellectual Property Court Criminal Judgment 101 Xing-Zhi-Shang-Yi-Zi No. 74 (2012). It held that an adult video work is copyright-eligible under the Taiwan Copyright Act and found the Japanese adult video works at dispute meet the orginaility requirement. Unfortunately, the TIPC court failed to address that issue in its first adult video copyright infringement case. To enrich the discussion related to the AV decision, this paper explores the 'choice of law' issues regarding the cross-border protection of copyright. The theory developed is to help resolve those issues ignored by the TIPC. Relying on the Berne Convention, this paper argues that the issues related to authorship, copyright-eligibility, originality, and ownership should be governed by the law of the country of origin. So, the appropriate governing law for the copyright cases concerning Japan adult videos is the Japan copyright law instead of the Taiwan copyright law.