Protection of related rights under Qatari Law No. 7 of 2002 «A comparative study»

Abstract

The rights related to copyright are one of the subjects introduced by the Qatari legislator into the Law No. 7 of 2002, as it had not existed under the Law for the Protection of Intellectual Works and the Old Copyright Law No. 25 of 1995.The main reason for the choice of this study in the current Qatari legislation is the accession of the State of Qatar to the Agreement Establishing by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the multilateral trade agreements annexed (TRIPS), which established the rules of international legal protection for this range of rights.This study deals the protection of related rights under Qatari law through two basic sections preceded by a historical introduction to the emergence of those rights in Qatar and France.This study is based – first – on the definition of rights related to Copyrights. We then clarified the meaning of those rights and identified three types of them, which are included exclusively in the Qatari and French legislations.We have detailed the content of these rights and illustrated their type’s witch we divided into two types: financial rights, and literary. We then reviewed the legal provisions governing the financial and literary rights of the performers in terms of how they are exploited, domain of protection, rights to remuneration, and rights of authors in respect of their works in the literary, scientific and artistic domains.We then detailed the provisions of the rights of producers of sound recordings or producers of phonograms in respect of their phonograms. Finally, we detailed the rights of broadcasting and television organizations in respect of their broadcasts under the Qatari and French laws.We have also presented in some details the legislative protection of related rights in terms of the means and types of such legislative protection, offering procedural, and civil and criminal protection. We then concluded this with the duration of the legislative protection of these rights, all through a comparative study between the Qatari and French laws.