Copyright Changes A Headache For Bosses
The Age
Thursday January 11, 2001
If your boss likes to take the credit for your ideas, a remedy might be at hand. Copyright law changes introduced to protect the moral rights of artists and writers now apply to workplaces nationally, a legal expert says.
Ben Atkinson, a copyright lawyer with Minter Ellison, said that under the new law, for example, junior architects could argue in court that they deserved credit on company designs. Secretaries could claim that they should be credited for the letters they drafted and even junior lawyers could seek acknowledgement for opinions they wrote on behalf of senior colleagues.
Mr Atkinson said the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act was passed before Christmas and gave protection to a wide range of employees in the private and public sectors. ``The aim is to ensure that authors and film directors and script writers have their artistic integrity respected. That is the purpose, but it actually goes beyond that in its effect," he said.
The law states that any author of a copyright work has moral rights to that work, even if the work itself belongs to an employer.
``This means that if an employer fails to acknowledge an employee as the author of a work, or alters the work in a way that offends the author's honor or reputation, the employee can take restraining legal action, obtain an apology or seek damages."
Mr Atkinson said employers should review their employment contracts to ensure they secured consent to treat the intellectual work of employees as they saw fit.
``The concept of moral rights derives from the idea that works of artistic merit have an individual identity that should be respected. The radical philosophical step the legislation takes is to assume that all works created in the course of business have artistic merit."
Mr Atkinson said the new law would promote what he termed the ``prima donna" syndrome. ``It will be interesting to see if a spate of litigation occurs once people become aware of the new law and the opportunities for disagreement that it creates," he said.
© 2001 The Age