12. Terms & Formalities and Ownership of Copyrights
Learning Objectives: Unit 12
Upon completion of this unit, you should be able to:
- Recall the statutory components of authorship and ownership.
- Explain what a work-for-hire is and how to analyze whether a something is a work made
for hire. - Analyze issues of authorship and ownership in a given factual scenario.
- Recall the consequences of authorship and ownership.
Assuming that a work is subject to copyright, the next question is “who owns the copyright.” The simple answer—the individual who created the work—is intuitive but not always correct. Under 17 U.S.C. § 201(a), it is true that the initial owner of a work is its author or authors. However, copyrights may be, and are, frequently transferred to another, as permitted by § 201(d). In addition, under the “works made for hire” doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 201(b), an employer may be deemed the “author” of the work under certain circumstances. CCNV v. Reid involves these issues. Before reading CCNV v. Reid, read 17 U.S.C. § 201. You should also be sure to look at the definition of “work made for hire” in 17 U.S.C. § 101.
17 U.S. Code § 201. Ownership of copyright (1978)
(b) Works Made for Hire.—In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright
17 U.S.C. §101. Definitions (2010)
A “work made for hire” is –
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
