
Sorting through ownership
Authorship of joint works
A work will only be jointly owned if the collaborators intended, at the time of creation, that their contributions would be joined into a unified whole and that they would be joint authors. Often collaborators agree on the first point, but they really haven't thought about the second. Because intent to be a joint author is subjective, each one may have different ideas, if they've thought about it at all. Intent is an important issue to discuss at the beginning of a project. Often there is a primary author and others whose roles are not as great. Primary authors should think about whether the resulting work will be theirs alone, or jointly owned with everyone else, and convey this early on. It is even better to document such discussions in an agreement of some kind, even a very informal one.
Has the author conveyed away any of his rights?
There are many reasons - here are some examples:
- transfer of copyright to a publisher as a condition of publication
- sponsorship or grant agreements may classify the work as a deliverable under the contract and require that the author transfer copyright to the sponsor
On the other hand, a research funder may require that the author retain a non-exclusive right to deposit their work to a public-access repository. In other words, the publisher would take the copyright, subject to the pre-existing right that the author was required to retain by their research funder. Institutions may require that all papers resulting from research supported by them will be deposited to an institutional repository. Publishers of such papers would take the copyrights subject to the pre-existing institutional right to deposit the papers to the institutional repository.
Like the result? If not, change it!
Once you know who owns what, you may decide that it's not at all how it should be. If so, you'll need to make some changes. If you feel you need an assignment of copyright from someone who contributed, to avoid a potential joint authorship issue, the assignment must be in writing and signed by the owner of the copyright. This might also be necessary if a contributor hired someone to write computer code, take photographs or do design work without a contract. Probably neither of them thought the person being hired would own copyright in what he produced, but that's what the law would dictate as the result. It is better to have the contract at the beginning, but it can be fixed after the fact. Even if you only need a license (in other words, permission to use a work rather than assignment of all the rights in it), it should be in writing so that the rights to use are clearly stated and documented.