Intellectual Property in Commercial Settings
What is an assignment?
Intellectual property 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. This is known as an assignment. A creator or inventor will usually assign their IP rights in exchange for payment or some other benefit, though this is not required.
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 assignee.
If a creator assigns their copyright, in full, to someone else, they can no longer copy, publish, adapt, publicly perform or communicate the work online, without the new owner’s permission. It does not matter that they were the creator of that work.
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. See the module Intellectual Property Principles: Topic 2: Creative IP 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.
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, a book writer, may agree with her publisher, before she writes her book, that once the book comes into existence it will be owned by the publisher.
Important lesson
Always read any document or contract that you are asked to sign. You may be signing away your intellectual property rights.