Assignments and licences
As we have seen, copyright is actually a bundle of different rights. The various copyrights can be disposed of just like any other property. The owner can do with it as he or she pleases. For example, you can let a friend use your car, and specify for how long and under what terms and conditions. You can agree to let her use it during the week because on the weekend someone else is renting it from you to use as an Uber — and so on. You can sell it when you want to, or you can give it away. Because you are the owner of the car.
Just as you could choose how your friend may use your car, in much the same way, the copyright owner has the (exclusive) right to allow others to exercise her rights in different ways.
A ‘licence’ is just permission for somebody to do something. For example, when you get a driving licence, the government permits you to drive a car because its officials are satisfied that you can do so safely and that you know the rules of the road. For our purposes, a licensor is the person who is granting the licence, and the licensee is the person who is licensed by the licensor.
Let’s take this book as an example. I own the copyright in the text. I have licensed Siber Ink to publish it in hardcopy printed and eBook form. I can licence ‘A’ to broadcast the book, ‘B’ to adapt it for a video-teaching film and ‘C’ to create an audiobook. And so on.
When you licence a third party to exercise the right that you own, importantly, you remain the owner of the right. An assignment, however, is different. Here, you transfer ownership to the third party.
An assignment can operate in the same divisible way as a licence. For example, you can assign the broadcasting right, but retain all the other rights relative to the particular work.
This divisibility can also operate geographically. Copyrights are territorial, as we discussed in the Introduction. Essentially, you can licence or assign your rights to ‘A’ in South Africa, to ‘B’ in the United Kingdom, to ‘C’ in France — and so on. It is also possible to put periods to either a licence or an assignment.
We will look at how international copyright works shortly.
To have legal validity, an assignment must be in writing and signed by the assignor — i.e. the copyright owner. The document does not necessarily need a heading such as ‘Assignment’, nor even words like ‘I hereby assign …’. However, it must be clear that what is intended is a transfer of ownership of the copyright(s) in question to a particular person or company. The same principles apply to exclusive licences. A non-exclusive licence, on the other hand, does not have to be in writing.
Read section 22 of the Copyright Act.
Even though an author has assigned her rights, she is entitled to claim authorship of the work and to object to any change to the work which will prejudice her honour or reputation. These are called the moral rights. A breach of one’s moral rights is treated as if it were an infringement of the copyright, and as if the author were still the owner.
Read section 20 of the Copyright Act.