Collective Work Legal Definition
The individual parts of the collective work are considered creative works, so the rights to them remain the property of their individual authors. This is stated in paragraph 2 of Article 38 of the Copyright Act, which states: “The right to use their own contributions separately is reserved for individual employees of the collective work, in accordance with the following agreed terms and standards.” In addition, Article 38 also provides that “in the case of a collective work, unless otherwise agreed, the right of economic exploitation exists with the publisher of the latter”, where “publisher” means the natural or legal person who assumes the economic risk and bears the costs of creating and publishing the work. An example would be a song in which the author of the music and the author of the lyrics each have the copyright on their contribution. [9] Authors have the moral right to be attributed, but only if they are the authors of a substantial part and it is reasonable to identify the author. [10] It may be inappropriate to assign each author to a collective work such as an encyclopedia. [11] In Hungary, a work is considered a collective work if the contributions of the authors involved in the creation of the work are combined into the proceeds of the joint creation in a way that makes it impossible to separately determine the rights of individual authors. In the case of collective work. Copyright is transferred by law to the natural or legal person, company or legal person on whose initiative and on whose instructions the work was created and which published it in its own name. [41] The term of protection of a collective work is seventy years from the first day of the year following the first disclosure of the work. [42] Under the 1911 act, the author of a contribution would regain copyright after 25 years, but this would be accompanied by the publisher`s right in the collective work. It was argued that the return of all rights to the author “would have been a great difficulty for owners of collective works, in particular of permanent works, such as encyclopedias, if they had not been able to acquire from the author an unlimited right to produce the work at a later date as part of the collective work”. However, the author could prevent the publisher from transferring or licensing his work to others. [20] Under the Copyright Act of 1956, employees retained copyright in their works unless otherwise agreed.
[16] CDPA annulled the waiver of workers` rights. [16] “Collective work” means a work, such as a periodical edition, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the work as a whole is assembled into a collective whole in an unchanged form with a series of other contributions that constitute in themselves distinct and independent works. A work that constitutes a collective work is not considered a derivative work (as defined below) for the purposes of this License. [5] New York Times Co. v. Supreme Court Tasini (2001) concerned independent journalists who had been paid for their contributions to print editions of newspapers and magazines, but whose contracts did not cover the digital rights of reproduction on CD-ROM or publication on the Internet. When the articles were distributed in electronic form a few years later, the court ruled that this did not constitute a revision of the work, as the articles were accessible individually. A revision should keep the articles in their original context. [21] In Faulkner v. National Geographic Enterprises Inc. (2005), an appellate court ruled that an electronic version of a newspaper was a revision of the collective work if it reproduced the paper version identically, including advertisements and photographs.
[21] The rise of the Internet has raised new questions about the rights of authors of contributions to a collective work. [35] When a newspaper is fully reproduced, reproduction is a matter for collective working arrangements. Publication in successive editions of a newspaper during the day, each of which reproduces a large part of the previous edition, is not considered to be a publication in another journal. The electronic publication of the entire newspaper could therefore be regarded as an edition of the same collective work. However, partial or selective reproduction may require the consent of contributors. In addition, contributors to a journal may have the right to separately publish a thematic selection of articles without violating the rights of the owner of the collective work. [36] Robertson v. Thomson Corp, [2006] 2 S.C.R. 363, 2006 SCC 43 is a 2006 Supreme Court of Canada decision on copyright ownership of published texts stored in databases. The judgment concluded that, although a newspaper held the copyright in the collection and arrangement of independent articles and in its journal, it could not publish the articles in a database. Publication in the database would remove the articles from the context of collective work and, therefore, their publication as such would not fall within the rights of the newspaper.
[14] Robertson decided that the copyright of independent journalists can stop the republication of their articles in databases that each display an article, but not on CD-ROMs with entire newspapers. The court held that a CD-ROM on which individual articles can only be viewed in the context of an entire newspaper is not a reissue of a single article as a single work, but a reproduction of the newspaper as a whole as a work. The concept of collective works in French Copyright is complex, and jurisprudence and scientific points of view do not always coincide. [27] Bernard Edelman, in his collective work: A Definition Not Found (1998), describes the legal definition of collective works as “obscure and confused”. [28] However, all authorities agree that the notion of collective works in France includes dictionaries, encyclopedias and periodicals such as newspapers or magazines. [27] Metropolitan Regional Information System, Inc. v. American Home Realty Network, Inc. [722 F.3d 591] was a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit case in which a court found that the copyright owner of a collective work such as an automated database was not required by a copyright application before the lawsuit was to identify authors` names and titles of individual works. In addition, clicking Yes to the Terms of Use and uploading a photo is sufficient to write the portion of the assignment of the right in accordance with 17 U.S.C.
§ 204. [22] An online database containing copyrighted works may be considered a collective work if the database owner has a “thin” copyright in the selection and arrangement of works in the database. Individual works may be protected by separate copyrights. [27] In Algeria, a collective work is protected against publication for 50 years, 50 years from the date it was made available to the public if it has not been published, or 50 years from the date on which it is determined that it has not been made available to the public within 50 years of its creation. [51] If you submit multiple works with a single application and the Copyright Office determines that the works can be registered together as a collective work, the Office may add a note to the certificate, such as “Basis for Registration: Collective Work.” As a general rule, the Office will not annotate the certificate if you specifically claim “collective work” or “compilation”. A contribution to a collective work is a distinct and independent work contained in a collective work.
