Who is the copyright owner?

[terrywynne]

Hi, hoping for someone with some knowledge of copyright law. Hopefully straightforward, not international IP rights of anything!

If someone commissions a report to be written by a consultant (invoice issued for the report, no employment contract, taxes etc the responsibility of the consultant), who owns the copyright on the report, the consultant who wrote it or the commissioner? I know that if it is an employee writing a report for an employer, the employer owns the copyright but can't find a straight answer in whether it is the same with an external consultant.

And can you have a clause in the agreement/terms and conditions that assigns the copyright differently from the default? As an addition to which, if the consultant owns the copyright, do they explicitly have to give permission for commissioner to share/make use of the report? I can find advice about books and magazines etc but not much on reports that are going to be shared in a limited fashion and for set purposes (ie: the report forms supporting evidence for an official application so everyone knows that it is being commissioned for the purposes of submitting an application)

TIA

And of course the essential information - in England!

you can definitely assign copyright to someone else via the terms & conditions - this is often done in publishing scientific papers.

is this a case where the report is already published and now you want to work out who owns it?

or are you planning a future publication and want to get it right from the start?

here is some advice on UK copyright law as it applies to universities that might be relevant to your situation

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/learning-teaching-support/ucl-copyright-advice

See this https://www.gov.uk/intellectual-property-an-overview - says * "If you’re self-employed, you usually own the intellectual property even if your work was commissioned by someone else - unless your contract with them gives them the rights*"

You've got a number of different options with respect to other people, you can give them the copyright or you can give them a licence to use it either in perpetuity or a limited period of time, and set conditions for example.

It depends on the circumstances, but the default position would be that the consultant retains the copyright, but the commissioning party would typically have an implied licence to use the report for the purposes that were reasonably envisaged when the arrangement was entered into. That's subject to any other agreement you've made, so you can provide contractually for any copyright to be assigned to the commissioner for example.

1988 CDPA - ownership rests with the author unless detailed otherwise in the contract.

It has arisen from an existing report where a second report commissioned by the same person has verbatim copied from the first report without adequately acknowledging where the text is from. Which to be honest I would have thought was a no no even if the commissioner owned the copyright of the first report and was in their rights to supply it to the second author.

But that aside, it has raised the question of whether more watertight copyright agreements are needed in the future. It's never really been an issue before because the reports are generally one use for a specific application and if there is a second report most people generally just refer back to the original report rather than cut and pasting into their document.

Thanks for the UCL link @parietal , I will have a browse.

@MurielThrockmorton @Onesixone and @SausagePastaForTea thank you for your comments as well - they posted while I was typing! That is all very useful and gives me a few more things to look into.

“copied from the first report without adequately acknowledging where the text is from. Which to be honest I would have thought was a no no”

You’re talking there about ‘moral rights’. Usually an author still has the legal right to be identified as the author of a work even if they’ve sold the copyright to someone else. That’s called moral rights. So writer A writes a book and sells the right sto it to writer B, writer B can’t then claim to have written it. I’m too sleepy to think about this properly but you might wanna google non-assignability of moral rights in copyright or something like that.

The default for a commissioned work is that copyright belongs to the owner. The contract can include a clause assigning ownership of copyright to the commissioner. In the absence of such a clause, the commissioner has an implied licence to use the work. The extent of the licence depends on what was reasonably intended by the parties at the time.

There isn't enough information in your posts to determine if there was a breach of copyright in the circumstances you describe. The implied licence may have allowed the commissioner of the first report to share it with the writer of the second report. Whether copying text from the first report is a breach depends on the circumstances, the extent of the implied licence and what proportion of the original report was copied into the new one.

"It has arisen from an existing report where a second report commissioned by the same person has verbatim copied from the first report"

I'm not commenting on the copyright question but this situation makes me wonder if the new report is of acceptable quality. The copying of content makes me think the consultant hasn't done new research or updated their findings/recommendations.

Thank you, that is helpful. I assume in your first instance that "owner" is the author?

I don't have any problem with the report being shared with the second author - I would say that is within any implied license. It was the verbatim copying of text with no indication of who wrote it (quote marks, references, author name etc) that was startling. I had citation drummed into me at university but I realise that is academia!

Just trying to decide now whether to be more explicit in spelling out who owns the copyright and the terms of any license to use rather than relying on implied copyright and licenses. Or whether to chalk this up to one author who doesn't understand referencing!

Well quite!

Sorry, yes I meant to say "author" in the first sentence.

Verbatim copying of text without attribution isn't necessarily a breach of copyright. To know for sure you would need to consult a lawyer who specialises in intellectual property.

I presume you are the author of the original report. Yes, you may want to consider putting something in your standard contract about the terms of the licence you are giving to the commissioner. But, as with @BeenRoundThatBlock, I would question whether the commissioner has got value for money from the second report if they have simply copied large sections of your report. If they feel they haven't, hopefully they won't use that consultant again.

in my work, NDAs mean that ownership remains with the commissioner; but generally because the subject is sector sensitive.
In publishing, certainly in the medical world, copyright is usually assigned by the authors to the publisher. That's because the publisher wants to make money from reprints, etc.