COPYRIGHT IN AN EMPLOYEE’S WORK

ECOVIS Miškinis, Kvainauskas ir partneriai advokatų kontora

Every employee’s job is more or less creative and produces some form of result: either material and (or) intellectual. Usually such a result belongs to an employer, but if it satisfies the specific requirements of “a work” in the meaning of copyright law, then relations between an employee and an employer will be regulated differently.

The first problem, in practice, arises when it should be answered: what kind of “work” is protected by copyright law. According to the Law on Copyright of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter - the Law), “a work” means any original result of creative activities in the literary, scientific or artistic domain, whatever may be its artistic value, the mode or form of its expression. The law even gives examples of works which may be protected by a copyright law, i.e.: books, articles, photographic works, speeches, lectures, written and verbal works of science, works of architecture, illustrations, maps, charts, other works.

However, both the definition of “a work” and the given examples are of a quite descriptive nature and often do not help to find out whether the particular object may be considered as “a work” in the meaning of a copyright law. In that case a test of three fundamental and essential requirements is used:

1) it must have resulted from a creative-intellectual activity of a natural person;

2) it must be original (this doesn’t mean new, but the unique and individual work of a person);

3) it must be of an objective form (so that others could objectively recognize and understand it).

If a particular result of an employee’s work meets the above-mentioned requirements, then the Law grants the following moral rights for the employee as an author:

1) the right of authorship (it means the right to claim authorship of the work, by indicating the author’s name in a prominent way on all the copies of a published work, and in connection with any other public use of the work

2) the right to the author’s name (it means the right to claim or prevent the mention of the author’s name in connection with any use of the work, or the right to claim that the work be disclosed to the public under a pseudonym

3) the right to the inviolability of a work (the right to object to any distortion or other modification of a work or the title thereof, as well as to any derogatory action in relation thereto which would be prejudicial to the author’s honor or reputation).

(continued in next issue)