Step towards harmonization - Implementation of the EU Copyright Law into Georgian Legislation

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Law - Media, Multimedia Law, Copyright, Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, course: Master of Law and Business (MLB)-Copyright Law, language: English, abstract: Copyright law is considered to be one of the most dynamically developing fields of the law. This dynamic character of development has been mentioned in the European Copyright legislation as well. Although the significant challenges to this legislation have already been successfully overcome, the critics show that it still has the long way to go, before reaching more complete and advanced level of harmonization. Together with the positive evaluations, the actual process of harmonizing European Copyright law has deserved some critics as well. Therefore, while implementing the norms of that law into the national legislation, especially in the countries not belonging to the European Union, the legislators have to take into account both – the positive and negative aspects observed in the European level, in order to guarantee the successful realization of the European Copyright law implementation.Georgian example has been provided, in order to acknowledge the challenges of European Copyright law implementation into the legislation of the country, which does not belong to the European Union. However, the process of harmonizing Georgian Copyright legislation with that of the European Union has been activated during slightly more than a decade. This period has been characterized by the high level of dynamic developments, reflected in the changes and amendments. The main characteristics of development of the Georgian Copyright law up until now have to be taken into account for the process of future harmonization. The process of European Copyright law implementation has its own challenges as well. An abstract desire of harmonizing the European law should not be enough to overcome these challenges. Rather, the legislator has to take into consideration not only the European law which has to be implemented, but the existing reality and the logic of development in the national law as well. Similarly, during the implementation, balance has to be found between the general interests of harmonization and national interests of the existing legislation. In our opinion, this kind of ‘balance-based’ approach would lead to the successful realization of the European Copyright law harmonization into the Georgian legislation.