ABSTRACT

The question of who should hold control over the rights in a literary work remains a vexed one, and there is frequently a divergence of opinion between authors and publishers, between publishers and literary agents and a divergence of practice between trade publishers and academic publishers. There is little doubt that in almost all cases the first owner of the copyright

in the work is the author. It is he or she who has written the work, and it is a condition of copyright that the work should be original. As Daniel Defoe argued, ‘A Book is the Author’s Property, ’tis the Child of his Invention, the Brat of his Brain’. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the chief exceptions to the ownership of copyright by the author under the provisions of UK copyright law are works written during the course of an author’s regular employment activities; US copyright law also makes provision for the copyright in ‘works for hire’ to belong to the commissioning party. In most cases, however, the author is the first owner of the copyright and hence in a position to choose whether to retain ownership or to pass it over in some way to another party. The two most common situations are retention of copyright by the author and the granting of exclusive publishing rights for a defined market, or full assignment of copyright.