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by Karliss 450 days ago
One more example demonstrating the opposite - in EU the copyright law explicitly states that transferable copyrights for software get automatically transferred from employees to the company. Which suggests that for other types of copyrightable works and author/customer relationships it doesn't happen automatically.
1 comments
CBarkleyU 450 days ago
Do you happen to have more reading material on said law?

In Germany, you can't even transfer copyright. So yeah, anything you create that reaches the threshold of having a copyright, you own the copyright. Even as an employee.

At the same time, you might not own the usage rights (Nutzungsrechte/Verwertungsrechte).

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Karliss 449 days ago
We might have a bit of miscommunication of what exactly is referred as "copyright", "transferring" and the way its translated in various languages. Wikipedia/Google translate suggests to me that generic name for copyright in German is "Urheberrecht" derived from author not copying, is that the problem?

By "copyrights" I am referring to all rights regulated by various copyright related laws not a specific subset of rights, including both the economic rights (all the useful stuff related to copying, redistributing, selling) and author's moral rights (can't be transferred, partially defined by national laws, stuff related to being author, right to be recognized as author and few other minor things).

Was able to find the European directive which has the point corresponding to what I was thinking about. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32... Article 3, point 2 "Where a computer program is created by an employee in the execution of his duties or following the instructions given by his employer, the employer exclusively shall be entitled to exercise all economic rights in the program so created, unless otherwise provided by contract.".

Do you consider usage rights as something which isn't part of copyright? Or do you not consider act as result of which you stop owning "usage rights" but someone else gets them "transferring".

From what I understand, technically non of the European directives are laws, but each member country is supposed to make laws based on the directives.

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