Copyright in the United Kingdom (continued)
Who owns copyright in a work?
The guiding principle is that the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it. The author of a work is the person who creates it (e.g. writer, painter, photographer) (s.9 of the Act). There are, however, exceptional cases in which the author of a work is not the first owner of the copyright in it.
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Where the work is a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or a film, and is made by an employee in the course of employment. Here the first owner is the employer.
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Where the work attracts Crown or Parliamentary copyright.
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The author of a computer-generated artistic, dramatic, literary or musical work is the person who undertakes the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work.
Commissioned Works
If you are commissioning work you should take care that the ownership or assignment of copyright is addressed specifically in the licence, otherwise copyright ownership may be disputed between the person commissioned (the author) and the commissioner (you).
However, it is well established that the legal owner of copyright may not also be the beneficial owner, and that the copyright is held on trust for some other party. This can occur by an express creation of trust or, of greater significance, where the author of the work has been commissioned to produce the work: in such a case it will commonly be the case that the beneficial interest in the copyright is owned by the commissioner, and accordingly that the author may be called upon by the commissioner to assign the legal ownership of the copyright to him/her.
The Act makes no provision for commissioned works. However, in the case of photographs and films, the commissioner of the photograph or film – assuming that the commissioner is not the author of it – taken for private and domestic purposes has the moral right to restrain public exploitation of the photograph or film.
Joint Authorship
s.10(1) provides that a ‘ work of joint authorship ’ is a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of each author is not distinct from the other author or authors. Joint authorship does not imply equality of contribution in terms of quantity, quality or originality. It is now also the case that the copyright in certain works is divisible rather than jointly owned where the authors have contributed distinct parts to the work; e.g. a book, some of whose chapters are written by A and some by B, is not a work of joint authorship, but rather a series of works of individual authorship.