joint authors

Joint authors are people that collaborate in the production of a copyright work and have a significant creative input into the work. The contributions of the joint authors are not distinguishable from one another. The contribution must be in a material or recorded form in the final embodiment of the work.

The contribution of a joint author cannot be one of mere ideas, as copyright protection is about protection of the expression of a work and not the ideas embodied within it. A story teller therefore would have no rights in his story unless he had written words that had eventually been recorded in the work in some form. Some measure of authorship which is "a responsibility for what appears on a page or other recorded form" is required in order to be a joint author.

Joint authors own the copyright in a work in equal shares, and exploitation of a work of joint authors requires the consent of both or all the owners. Where one author exploits the work without the consent of the other, the joint owner not giving consent will be entitled to sue for infringement, claiming damages and an injunction.

Application to Computer Source Code

In the context of software development, where individual developers have worked on completely separate versions of the work, and say produce successive versions, each developer will be the author of the copyright in their respective versions of the work, but not the copyright that exists in the source code that they started with and remains in the version of the work that they worked on. In contrast, where the developers work on the same version together in the manner described above, they will be joint authors of the work. If the contribution by the developer is trivial, then the law does not recognise them as a joint author, but as a co-author. A co-authors own the copyright in their respective contributions to the work separately and not jointly.

Usage: The joint authors were in dispute over the exploitation of the copyright work.

Related Words: copyright; damages; injunction; infringement; Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 UK; intellectual property; copyright infringement; substantial part; literary work.