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SEPARATE TRANSLATION RIGHTS FOR TRADITIONAL AND SIMPLIFIED CHINESE
Under the Copyright Law, the right to adapt to work is an exclusive right of the author, and translation is defined as a type of adaptation. With regard to licensing, Article 37 Paragraph 1 of the law provides that the owner of economic rights in a work may license other persons to exploit the work, and that the territory, duration, content, mode of exploitation, and other par-ticulars of the license shall be as agreed between the parties. But if any part of such an agreement is unclear, it is presumed that the affected rights were not granted.
If a licensing agreement grants the right to translate a foreign-language work into "tradi-tional Chinese characters," does the scope of the license granted also include simplified Chinese characters? And what if such an agreement merely states that it grants the right to translate the work into "the Chinese language," but does not state explicitly whether it refers to traditional characters or simplified characters? These have frequently been areas of doubt.
In a recent judgment concerning the Chinese translation rights for a Harry Potter book, the Supreme Court stated that although traditional and simplified Chinese were both Chinese in the broad sense, the characters used in each were different. The people in Taiwan were not equally familiar with both, nor were they equally ac-customed to using both. Therefore the two could not be said to be entirely the same. What the appellant had acquired were exclusive rights to the "traditional Chinese edition" of the Harry Potter book in question, and not to the "simpli-fied Chinese edition." Thus the defendant's ac-tions of disseminating and selling a simplified Chinese edition of the book could not be said to infringe on the appellant's economic rights in the work.
The implication of the judgment is that a license granting "the right of translation into traditional Chinese" does not include the right of translation into simplified Chinese. But if a licensing agreement merely states that it grants "the right to translation into Chinese," and does not state explicitly whether this refers to traditional or simplified Chinese characters, then the courts are likely to interpret the agreement as being unclear, and to presume that no translation right for the simplified Chinese version has been granted. Therefore, when licensing language translation rights for a work, to avoid dispute it is advisable to clearly stipulate the type of language for which translation rights are granted, and the geographical territory to which the right of ex-ploitation applies.