Authorship and Ownership of Copyright

A freelance photographer is paid to shoot a wedding in Navi Mumbai. A young software engineer writes code for her employer on weekends and on office laptops. A newspaper reporter files a story that appears the next morning. In each case someone wrote, clicked or typed, and someone else paid. Who owns the copyright? The Act starts with a simple answer, the author, and then lists the situations in which that answer changes.

In two minutes

The author is the first owner of copyright (s.17), except where the Act says otherwise: newspaper employment, commissioned photographs, portraits, engravings and films, employment under a contract of service, speeches, Government works, public undertakings and works of international organisations, each subject to a contrary agreement.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.