Re: copyright and natural law?

Timothy Arnold Moore <tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>
> My understanding was that the provisions in UK copyright legislation
> (and others in that tradition including US) giving automatic ownership
> to employers of works created in the course of employment was simply a
> codification of the pre-existing position under English agency law i.e.
> employees are treated as the arm of their employer when they act in
> their capacity as employees (except the case law would probably have
> used servant-master language ;-).

As I understand, the American position is one further step on from that in the UK -

(a) in the UK, an employed author is still the author at law but his employer is deemed to be the first owner (therefore a form of transfer by operation of law or "involuntary assignment" [to coin an oxymoron]);

(b) in the US, the employer (or, in some cases, the commissioner) is deemed to *be* the author (and, *in consequence*, first owner) because of the tradition of trying to shoehorn everything within the idea of authorship defined by the four walls of Art. 1, sec. 8.

Gary Lea
<g.r.lea[_at_]btinternet.com> Received on Tue Sep 15 1998 - 18:23:34 GMT