Joint authorship

Joint authorship of a copyrightable work is when two or more persons contribute enough to the work to be the author of that work. In the case of joint authorship, the authors share the copyright in the work with each other. Joint authorship of a copyrightable work is when two or more persons contribute enough to the work to be the author of that work. In the case of joint authorship, the authors share the copyright in the work with each other. Article 7bis of the Berne Convention states the term of protection for works of joint authorship and extends the general terms of protection provided under Article 7 to works of joint authorship, under the condition that the term of copyright protection must be measured from the death of the last surviving author. But the Berne Convention doesn’t define what works of joint authorship are, because various national legislations have a lot of variations while defining the same, and have a different approach to the topic. This problem relating to joint authorship is not specifically dealt with by other international agreements as well, like the UCC, TRIPS, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty 1996. A joint work is defined in Section 101 of the U.S. Copyright Act as 'a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole'. Section 201(a) gives the status of co-ownership in the copyrighted work to such authors of a joint work. Under the US copyright law, a person has to prove the following two things for claiming joint authorship in a work: The individual contributions made by authors to a joint work need not necessarily be equal in quality or quantity. Nevertheless, the author has to show that his contribution to the joint work is copyrightable by itself. A contribution of mere ideas is not sufficient. In order to be a joint author, one must contribute expression. For the expression to be copyrightable it has to be original – that is independently created and possess at least a minimal degree of creativity. However, in Gaiman v. McFarlane, where the issue of joint authorship was on the creation of new characters for an existing comic series, the court held that there will be joint-authorship even though the author's contribution was not independently copyrightable. The reasoning given behind this was that if more than one person laboured to create a single copyrightable work, then it would be paradoxical if no one was able to claim copyright because the individual contributions were not themselves copyrightable. While in this case, recent decisions holding that individual contribution must be independently copyrightable were not explicitly overruled, they were distinguished on facts. It was also observed that the lower standard for joint authorship only applies to mixed media works. The core of joint authorship is joint labouring by two or more persons in order to complete a pre-concerted common design. In the absence of a pre-concerted common design, the completed work will not be regarded as a joint work. However, it is not required of the several authors that they must necessarily work in physical propinquity or in concert. In Edward B. Marks Music Corp. v. Jerry Vogel Music Co, the court held that while producing a musical composition jointly, two men will be coauthors and owners of the copyright even if they labour at different times, without consulting each other, and remain strangers to each other. It is a work of joint authorship if a person creates lyrics or music with the intention that his work shall be combined with the work of another person who shall create the music or write the lyrics, as the case may be, so as to make the composition complete. The touchstone here is the intention, at the time the writing is done, that the parts be absorbed or combined into an integrated unit, although the parts themselves may be either 'inseparable' (as the case of a novel or painting) or 'interdependent' (as in the case of a motion picture, opera, or the words and music of a song). Hence, joint authors must have the intention of combining their respective works at the time of creating the work, and not at some later date.