Property rights to design files

[IJWesley]

...and to further confuse things, all the above Para's talk about the "owner" of copyright but don't acknowledge the subtle difference of the "controller" of the copyrights.

 

...just to stir the pot a bit more on this. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) can be split into two distinct types - Economic and Non-Economic.

 

Economic IPRs are the type we are all familiar with; patents, which protect new devices, substances, methods or processes; copyright, which protects the expression of ideas (but not the ideas themselves); designs, which protect the overall appearance of a product; and trademarks, which are used to differentiate between traders of similar products. There are others and every jurisdiction is different. These rights can be traded and licenced. Usually, employees, and often contractors, are obliged to hand the economic rights of anything they develop in the course of their employment over to the employer. As previously noted, the owner may or may not be the ultimate controller of the rights.

 

Non-economic rights exist in some jurisdictions. These are often known as Moral Rights and are the rights of the creator of a Copyright Work or Design to be attributed as the author of the work and the right of integrity of the work. It is these rights that prevent the producer of a theatre work from making changes to the script or music without permission. Importantly, Moral Rights cannot be traded or licenced and they are personal rights, belonging to the individual creator, not the employing company. So, if you create an amazing design for theatre set, and the presenting company decides, for reasons of cost, to junk half of it when reviving the show, you may have recourse under Moral Rights to either have the design used in it's complete form, or not used at all.

 

So, before you sign on the dotted line, make sure you know what you are handing over, and what control you have in the future.