Photographic work is one of eight categories of works clearly enumerated in the Copyright Law of China. As early as the first Copyright Law enacted in 1990, “photographic work” is listed as a protected work. The nature of photographic works as artistic works has been widely recognized
today all over the world. However, photographic works have not been explicitly listed as protected works in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary Works until the 1948 Brussels text, and the duration of copyright protection for photographs has long been subjected to discriminatory treatment. This treatment can be attributed to the fact that at the early stage of the application of photographic technology, many people believed that “the skill required to produce the final picture may only be the simple manual operation of operating a shutter or pushing a button.” Such a belief resulted in a lower level of protection for photographic works than that for most other works.