Smit & Van Wyk, Inc.

Agreements Regarding International Copyright

The work your produce in for instance, South Africa, also need copyright protection internationally. With the Internet usage increase, copyright infringements have also increased. Understanding international copyrights and the implications of making information available on the Internet, is important if you want to protect your work against infringements.

Smit & Van Wyk can help with any copyright related issues.  The GATT also known in full as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs is an agreement established in 1994 during the WTO (World Trade Organisation) talks. The agreement regulates various aspects of international copyrights in addition to other intellectual property issues.

With GATT, copyright registrations amongst member states are made as easy as possible with computer and software programming seen as part of the works that fall within the scope of copyright protection.  GATT stipulates that citizens of a country should not be granted more rights regarding copyright by their government than the citizens of other member states. GATT has set rules for the settling of copyright disputes and the rules are enforced by the TRIPS. Countries not complying with the rules may get sanctions instituted against them for non-compliance.

With such agreements in place for international copyrights, it is possible to have some form of copyright protection on a semi-global scale. Since it can be rather difficult to enforce copyright protection on the Internet and in other countries without some form of cooperation amongst nations, such international intellectual property agreements are in most part respected by member states.