Stick and Carrot Approach in Protecting Authors’ Rights in Cyberspace

Easy and quick access to the copyright content in cyberspace has increasingly exposed the authors’ works to piracy and plagiarism. Accordingly, copyright traditional protection fails to fulfill the requirements of protecting the authors’ rights in the state-of-the-art environment of digital world. In order to protect the authors’ rights in cyberspace, it is needed to benefit from all possible strategies and social cooperation in addition to updating the rules and regulations in line with technology improvement.
To find a comprehensive template to protect the authors’ rights in cyberspace, this article reviews the existing related approaches in particular in the legal system of Iran, the United States and the European Union. In addition to preventive and punishing strategies such as sanctions, obligations for cyberspace active players and technical measures, the possible approaches may include persuasive and social strategies like collective management, revenue share between the host of the content and the right holders, information dissemination in cyberspace and social campaigns.