For a long time, copyright law was perceived as an individualistic system protecting the legal position of the right holders only. In recent times, however, awareness has grown that the current legal framework risks becoming imbalanced to the detriment of third parties – be it consumers, creators of subsequent works etc. – or of the public interest in general. This leads to the question of how copyright law takes into account these interests of third parties, especially the general interest in the greatest dissemination of knowledge and culture. In fact, all countries have to deal with this captivating legislative challenge. These considerations led the International Academy of Comparative Law to open its quadrennial congress for the first time to copyright issues in 2010, and to ask the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law to execute a questionnaire, to conduct a survey and to lead a panel on the “Balance of Copyright” during the XVIII Congress. In the course of analyzing the answers culled from a limited number of participating countries, the editors of this book realized how enlightening the results of the survey were. Consequently, the project was extended and further reporters were asked to provide insights into the situation in their countries. The output of this project is the present compilation of 39 contributions, reporting on 41 countries from every inhabited continent, including an overview attempting to summarize the most prominent results of the comparison. This overview, however, may only be a first step in the analysis of all results, since each of the 12 issues addressed in the questionnaire provides enough material for further independent studies. There were indeed a lot of surprises, and the overview cannot reveal more than a few of them whereas further details may be found in the national reports. Let us mention only one issue here to exemplify the hard work to which the national reporters were submitted.