Intellectual Property in Commercial Settings
Ownership by assignment
In commercial practice, people will usually specify who will own IP through a contractual agreement.
Both copyright and patent laws give creators and inventors the right to sell their legal entitlements for economic benefits. An individual inventor or creator may transfer their rights to another person or corporation, in exchange of payment. This is known as an assignment.
To be a valid transfer of ownership rights, an assignment must be in writing and signed by the person transferring their rights (the ‘assignor’) and the person receiving the rights (the ‘assignee’).
An assignment may be a complete transfer of all rights, or it can be partial. For example, a copyright owner may assign only the right of first publication or only the right of adaptation. Assignments can also be limited by territory (e.g. only in Australia) or by time (e.g. only for the next 10 years).
Once a right is assigned, it is transferred completely to the new owner (the assignee). The assignee can then license that right, assign it to someone else, or sue another person for infringement of that right. The assignor retains no residual entitlements in relation to the right assigned, and may even be sued for infringement by the new owner.
If a creator assigns their copyright to someone else, they can no longer copy, publish, adapt, publicly perform or communicate the work online, without the new owner’s permission. However, they retain their moral rights to be properly attributed as the author of the work and to have the work treated with integrity. Moral rights cannot be assigned and remain with the original creator for the duration of the copyright term. (Refer to the module Intellectual Property Principles, Topic 2 for more on moral rights and copyright duration.)
This is important to remember:
If a creator or inventor assigns away their copyright or patent rights, they have no residual rights, except for moral rights under copyright. Thus if Pauline, an author, assigns the copyright in her book to her publisher, she has no rights left to use, copy or share copies of her book without the publisher’s permission – even though she wrote it.
Rights may be assigned after they are acquired or before they are acquired. In other words, it is possible to assign an interest that will come into existence at a future time. For example, Pauline may agree with her publisher, before she writes her book, that once the book comes into existence it will be owned by the publisher.
An important lesson
Always read any document or contract that you are asked to sign. You may be signing away your intellectual property rights!