Hungarian Response:

Other Country Response

The Scenario and Major Players

Hungary's Position

Defending The Position

Other Country Response

The Scenario and Major Players:

In the first scenario, student B has copied the formatting (look and feel) information from student A for his resume. When confronted with the situation, student B attempted to claim that student A did not have a copyright notice on the page. At this point the situation was taken to the honor court, making the two students, the honor court members and the university the major players in this scenario.

In the second scenario, author Doris Kearns Goodwin is accused of copying text from various books and including the text directly in her history books. When the first case of plagiarism was pointed out, it was quickly discovered that this was not he only time Goodwin has done this. Hungary's Position:

Analyzing the first situation from the point of view of Hungarian law yields very unsurprising results. Based on information collected during our reesarch, it appears that Hungary would most likely agree with the United States in the outcome, "Look and feel is not protected under copyright law."

The second scenario is again unsurprising. Hungary's constitution, which will be covered later, does not protect freedom of speech. At the same time, Hungary has signed all of the international treaties on the protection of intellectual property and copyrights. Because of this position, it can be assumed that Goodwin would be guilty of copyright infringement based on international law.

Defending The Position:

After reading Hungary's Constitution, is appears that the constitution makes no comment on freedom of speech, nor does it comment on the power of a copyright. Hungary, therefore has adopted the international copyright laws as it own. As we will see, Hungary has signed all the major intellectual property right treaties in the past decade. This position shows that although Hungary may not directly have copyright laws in it's constitution, it does accept the idea of intellectual property.

The first point to consider in the first scenario is if student A ever held a copyright on the material in the first place, since he did not place a copyright notice directly on the page. If student A never held a valid copyright, than this would not be a problem. According to Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, according to the Berne copyright convention, "almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. The default you should assume for other people's works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you know otherwise." According to the Copyright Law FAQ, Hungary agreed the Berne copyright convention in 1971. Therefore, even though student A did not put a copyright notice directly on the document, student B should have assumed that the document was copyrighted, unless otherwise explicitly told that it was not.

Since student A holds the copyright, he has the option of challenging student B's use of the look and feel. This leads to the second major question, "Is look and feel protected under copyright law?" In 1996 Hungary signed the World Intellectual Property Organization's Copyright Treaty. This treaty, which became affective in March 2001 builds a common set of copyright laws to be used by all signing countries. Among the signing countries, the U.S. was one of the leading backers of the treaty. Therefore, it can be assumed that international (including Hungary) copyright law would be very similar to that of the United States.

To further back this position when considering Hungary, is it important to look at the Ladas & Parry news report stating that effective July 1, Hungary will be extending the length of a copyright from 50 years past the authors death to 70 years. This extension brings Hungary more into compliance with current U.S. copyright lengths.

Now that it can be seen that Hungary has a very similar copyright structure to the United States, without a direct case to evaluate, it can only be assumed that given the same scenario, the Hungarian legal system would find the same conclusions as the United States. These conclusions would be that look and feel is not protected under copyright law. Therefore student B, only copying the HTML tags, has not violated copyright law, even though student A did hold a valid copyright on the material.

The second scenario is a much simpler case. As was stated before, Hungary has signed the Berne Convention. In article 2, paragraph 1, the convention states, " The expression "literary and artistic works" shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, pamphlets and other writings...", showing that all books are protected under copyright law. Therefore, Goodwin is guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringement under Hungarian law.

This second scenario turns out to be much simpler because a clear copyright infringement is present. Also, the text of the books was directly copied, rather than just the formatting as we saw in the first scenario. The Berne convention clearly states that the exact copying of text is against the law.

Back to the Top