Re: copyright and natural law?

Gary Lea <g.r.lea[_at_]btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

UK (and Australian) legislation define the "author" as the person who first reduces the work to material form. The employer (in most situations) is the owner not the "author" as defined in the Copyright Act. This particular anomaly of the wording does not change the historical justification based on agency law. I don't believe that this distinction has any impact on substantive or procedural law, and the historical background seems to justify that the employer has the natural law authorship right rather than her agent.

-- 
| Tim Arnold-Moore, LL.B., B.Sc. (Hons)
| Postal address:  Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT
|                  GPO Box 2476V
|                  Melbourne 3001
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|	simul iustus et peccator
<tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au>