Can A Company Be An 'Author' For The Purpose Of Copyright?
from the questions,-questions... dept
Paul Keating points us to an analysis of an interesting copyright ruling in Singapore last year, which said that companies can't be "authors" for the purpose of copyright. They can be owners of the copyright, but not the authors:The Court of Appeal drew a distinction between authorship and ownership. It held that these were not synonymous in that authorship refers to the act of creation whereas ownership refers to the possession of proprietary rights. An author is not necessarily the owner and the owner is not necessarily the author. The Court of Appeal said, definitively, that for the purposes of the Copyright Act, authors had to be living persons. To hold otherwise would run counter to other sections of the Copyright Act, notably the duration of works. The Court held that companies could not claim a perpetual monopoly of copyright ownership based on an assertion of authorship.The specific case involved horse-racing tables and a dispute between two different horse-racing magazines, with one accusing the other of copyright infringement. Oddly, both magazines seem to admit that the actual data originated from neither magazine, but from the same third party: the Singapore Turf Club. Still, there appears to have been some questions about the layout and design, which could be given some level of copyright protection -- but, apparently, only if it were created by "living humans."
While this specific case may not be all that interesting, it does raise some interesting questions in other areas. For example, there is a growing niche industry of "automated" books being created for sale on Amazon. Many of them take things like public data and compile them into an ebook for sale. There wouldn't be any copyright on such public data, but if something similar was done with some creative input from an automated system, it seems like a rather reasonable argument can (and should!) be made that those books are public domain. I guess it's the automated equivalent of the monkeys taking photographs, where it seemed clear that those, too, were in the public domain, because they weren't created by humans...
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Filed Under: authors, automated creations, copyright, humans, public domain, singapore
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The examples coming to my mind are visual art; like if I design a program that produces aesthetically pleasing fractal images without any input other than some publicly available string of numbers (like weather data or something). Should I not be able to claim copyright on those images?
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The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act assigns copyright in computer generated works to the person who made "the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work", though this interesting Duke Law & Technology Review article argues it's not always obvious what that means, or whether it's the right approach. It also talks extensively about Mandelbrot sets. :)
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Re: Automated creation is not creative
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Re: Re: Automated creation is not creative
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Re: One wonders why Disney et al never thought of this
Bu don't worry, I'm sure they are figuring out a way to get rid of it even as we speak (or at least make it irrelevant to their power grabs).
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Re: Re: One wonders why Disney et al never thought of this
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Re: Re: Re: One wonders why Disney et al never thought of this
Comic book companies (Marve/DC/Image, etc.) claim the copyright on any work done for them (except licensed comics like Star Wars, which list their corporate owners as the copyright holder or creator-owned projects like HellBoy.)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: One wonders why Disney et al never thought of this
"'For the purpose of copyright' is nothing more than a transparent attempt to subvert the law and deny the creator his rightful termination rights."
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Re: Re: Re: Re: One wonders why Disney et al never thought of this
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It's very simple...
I do not understand the concept of corporate owned copyrights... Perpetual exclusive license to distribute assigned to a company, but not ownership. To that effect, work for hire should default to the person/company who paid for said work to have assumed to have such a license, unless otherwise stated via contract.
I'm tired of corporate person-hood, so long as any company/industry is considered "too big to let fail." or fall, or die. The rules for a non-living entity should emphatically not be the same as a person.
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Re: It's very simple...
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Ie fractal art.
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Defining creator of a collaboration
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Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120302/03503317944/emi-sneakily-trying-to-pretend-many-its-artist s-cant-reclaim-their-copyrights.shtml
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Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
Huh.
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Re: Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
Also, game design projects of any appreciable size do have directors. Someone has to decide the design and flow of the game. What goes in and what doesn't. A small group might have "design by committee", but with 20 people or more, chaos is all but guarantied.
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Re: Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
Terry Nation created The Daleks as part of his work-for-hire assignment to write scripts for the Dr Who tv series.
Whenever the BBC uses The Daleks in the show or licensed products, Nation's estate (he passed away several years ago) gets paid.
In addition, Nation issued a number of products (including books, comics, and toys) featuring the Daleks (but NOT any other element of Dr Who continuity), and even tried to sell a Daleks tv series to American tv networks (who turned it down due to budget constraints) in the 1960s.
Since then, the BBC's in-house producers and script editors create their characters, then assign them to scriptwriters.
You'll note they rarely bring back "classic" aliens and characters, since they have to pay the original authors (or the estates) for their use.
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Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
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Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
1. The right of termination is NOT why authorship is important. The Human involvement is fundamental to the entire purpose of copyright - the advancement of..... The termination rights were intended to compensation the creator from having essentially sold the rights at an undervalued price.
2. In collaborative works the rights are held by each of the collaborators (limited to those having a substantive input in the creation). The rights are held by the group but if I remember correctly, each has the right to manage the rights bundle subject to (a) the obligation to account for profits and (b) any State partnership laws that may apply due to the collaborative effort (a joint activity undertaken with the intent to share benefits and costs is a partnership by definition).
Hope this helps.
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Re: Re: Defining creator of a collaboration
2. So you are saying that in a collaboration all of those with substantial input share ownership as a group of the overall work and therefore the group is considered the overall creator? If that is the case, how do termination rights apply to this? Do they simply not exist for a collaboration because it's a collaboration or do they have to act with a consensus as a group to exercise those rights?
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US law is different
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Re: US law is different
Furthermore, movie studios by their own admission often recognize that they consider the director to be the overall creator when they publicly market a film as "a film by ". The fact that they put in the fine print at the end of the credits "author for the purpose of copyright" should have no legal bearing. What the hell is that? Either you created something or you didn't. It's like sort of like being "kinda pregnant." "For the purpose of copyright" is nothing more than a transparent attempt to subvert the law and deny the creator his rightful termination rights.
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Auto-tune is another tool that the producer of a song in conjunction with technicians recording and "correcting" the piece are in control over decisions like when where and how to use auto-tune so ultimately the technology isn't making the decisions itself one or more human beings are.
To date, as far as I know, there isn't a computer program out there that can independently create without human input of some kind or another, even if it's just a little.
For now, at least, a living, breathing, organic, analogue human would hold the copyright in my view. That may change but we're a long way from an "I Robot" world as envisioned by Issac Asimov (NOT that crappy movie) but then things move so quickly these days you can never tell.
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The ruling suggests that someone writing an article for a magazine on work for hire would be the only one with a valid copyright on the material, and the magazine that paid for the work could not hold it. That seems pretty silly on it's face.
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In the US the defaults are:
Works for hire (by employees) are created by the employee but automatically assigned (by operation of law)to the employer.
Works created by independent persons (non-employees) are created by the author but absent a written contract to the contrary, there is no transfer of the ownership in the copyright. The person paying for the work obtains a non-exclusive license to use. The author retains all ownership.
In the Singapore case, the corporation who "claimed" ownership could not identify any human creator. As a result, the court found that there could not be any copyright to "own" since the missing foundational requirement of a human creator prevented the copyright from having arisen in the first place.
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My point EXACTLY.
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