0.2 The scope of copyright law  (Page 6/10)

Article 10, Section 2 of the TRIPS Agreement, on the other hand, requires member countries of the WTO to extend copyright protection to all compilations: 

“Compilations of data or other material, whether in machine readable or other form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such. Such protection, which shall not extend to the data or material itself, shall be without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material itself.” 

Employees and works for hire

Employees are often hired to create literary or artistic works for their employer. This relationship sometimes confuses the allocation of authorship rights.

By default, civil law countries vest authorship and its attendant rights in the employee, not the employer. This approach requires that employers contract with employees to obtain the copyrights to the creative works. For instance, the French Intellectual Property Code stipulates that copyright vests in the work’s actual author and not his employer. There is an exception in the French Code for some categories of work, such as software, where rights are immediately assigned to the employer. On the other hand, some civil law countries, including Germany, automatically assign copyright from the employee to the employer.

Common-law countries, such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, by default award the copyright for an employee's invention to her employer. For instance, Canadian copyright law states that if a work is created within the scope of employment, “the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of agreement to the contrary, be the first holder of the copyright.” Under the British Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, if a copyrighted work is made by an employee in the course of that employment, the copyright is automatically owned by the employer as a "work for hire." The United States has a similar rule, but also provides that a work may become a "work for hire" even if it is created by an independent contractor (rather than an employee acting within the scope of employment) so long as the work (a) falls within a limited list of eligible types of works and (b) the parties agree in writing that it shall be classified as a work for hire.

Civil servants, researchers and professors

In some countries, college and university faculty members have been exempted from the  " work for hire "  doctrine.

In some countries, works made in the scope of the employment of civil servants are also excluded from the “work for hire” doctrine, because they are denied copyright protection altogether. In other countries, this is not true. For instance, copyright law in the Czech Republic contains a presumption that a work created by a civil servant is a work for hire, and the copyright and authorship rights are granted to the employer.