You are an intrepid budding author, but unfortunately do not own a computer. Your friend Miles, however, kindly agrees to let you use his computer for 4 hours a day to work on your book.
After months of hard work, your book is finished! But shortly afterward, Miles finds out about the time you hooked up with his sister. He stops talking to you, and the only copy of your book is on his computer’s hard drive, to which he will no longer grant you access.
Who owns the digital file, you or Miles?
You do. Copyright applies the minute an idea is “fixed in tangible form.” But you might not be able to actually get the file; a friend need not let you use his computer to retrieve it.
What do you mean by “owns”?
He owns the physical copy of the file on his computer. You own the copyright. He can’t publish it without your permission. Now, establishing that you are the author, and getting access to it, may be a problem. But legally he can’t do anything with it.
What would be the status of a mural that you painted on the wall of a house he owned?
Tattoo a poem you’ve thought up on someone then ask this question again.
It really demonstrates the difference between intellectual and physical property.
Not only that–if Miles decided to format his hard drive, I doubt the author would have any legal recourse. You might own the copyright, but Miles owns the hardware; as long as he’s not profiting from it or sharing it without your permission, I don’t think you can say boo.
(If I’m wrong, I eagerly await correction).
He can’t publish it, but I’m pretty sure he can delete it if he wants.
Now, if you rented the computer from him for a nominal fee, that might be different, but if he just let you borrow it when he wasn’t using it, I think your rights are limited.
Without any other agreement between you and the friend, the intellectual property represented by the file does belong to you. The creator of the work has the default rights to/in it.
Of course, having created your file on his computer does not give you automatic rights to his computer, nor create any obligation on his part to provide you with the file. I suppose you could sue for damages and the courts would look at what kind of agreements and expectations the two of you had. I don’t really know the written laws or case law on this kind of personal issue, but you shouldn’t count on getting what you want.
I actually have some personal experience with something like this. As a freelance service provider, I did the layout and formatting for someone’s book - their text, art, etc. but I put it into a file and got it ready for printing. I gave them a PDF and some other files. They lost these files not once but four times over the course of five years. The first three times, I still had the files on hand and gave them a backup. The fourth time, I’d deleted the files. They dragged me over to the BBB over it, and even the BBB agreed that I had done all the contracted work as requested and had no obligation to store the files for her indefinitely.
Now you note that I mentioned “contract work.” In any case like this, you really want things in writing if there’s ever a dispute. You don’t want a dispute to hinge on he-said/she-said arguments.
One situation that’s common is using your employer’s computer, because there might well be a contract making anything you do using their computer their property. In these cases, ownership is frequently disputed and it often comes down to parsing the law, the details of what happened and what was said in the agreement.
By “do,” I meant “make use of it.” He could delete it, or for that matter throw the computer out. I don’t think you would have any recourse.
Some web sites make you agree to relinquish copyright to add something to the site. Probably the best-known is Wikipedia, where everything you create is added to Collective Commons.
You can add stuff that’s under previous copyright but only with official permission given to the site to use it.
You don’t relinquish copyright, you just agree to license the material for release under Creative Commons. You retain rights to republish it yourself in any manner. From the site:
I suppose I should clarify that you can’t claim control over the info. Relinquishing copyright is not accurate. I’ve had numerous times when someone added info that they later either wanted removed or wanted nobody to change afterward because as “creator” they “owned” it.
Brain fart on my part for the “Collective Commons” bit.
My point was that sometimes when you’re choosing to use a medium to store or present your work you have to pay attention to the rules you agree to when you use that medium. You may not have the control over your work that you assume.
I have to admit I am curious what was her reasoning as to your responsibility for her files after 5 years?
Well, I’m not sure what all the legal implications are, but apparently several people have sold works painted by anonymous street artist Banksy on their buildings.
Tattoos may not be the best example, though, because the exact legal rights a tattoo artist actually has over their creation is pretty murky. For example, what if a picture of your tattoo ends up in a magazine? If it were just a photograph of a painting, the magazine might owe the artist royalties but is that also true with tattoos?
Tattoo artists have traditionally shied away from claiming any sort of intellectual property ownership over what’s tattooed on their customers’ bodies, but the actual legal limits of what they could do haven’t been particularly well-explored by the courts.
Tell me more about Miles’ sister whom I hooked up with. I don’t usually forget my hookups…
That was sort of my point. You’re the owner of the physical wall, and hence the physical painting. The people who sold the Banksy works actually removed the piece of the wall that contained it in order to sell it.
Copyright involves the right to make physical copies of a work. The owners can sell the original physical copy, but not make additional copies.
The article mentioned that the original has been replaced by a copy placed on the building under Perspex. That would presumably be a violation of Banksy’s copyright, but that’s moot if he chooses not to make an issue of it.
And this, among other reasons, is why you back your work on that cheap USB stick, or Box (cloud storage)!
She didn’t really have much reasoning other than that’s what she wanted. It’s part of why I’m bitter towards the BBB over the whole thing. While they eventually agreed with me and removed any negative mark against me, it took something like five hours of dealing with them for them to see that the customer is not always right and that I’d already gone above and beyond what she paid me to do.
I suppose part of it comes back to no good deed going unpunished. After all, I’d already provided it three other times, so (begin sarcasm font) obviously I’ve committed myself to being a lifelong data repository at no cost.
That was my thought: how good could a book be, when the author’s too dumb to keep their own backup copy?
If you write and mail a letter to someone, who owns the contents of the letter, the sender or the receiver? The answer is the sender, even if he didn’t keep any kind of copy or record as to the contents. If the receiver of the letter or anyone else wants to publish it, they have to get the permission of the writer.
On the other hand, the receiver owns the physical copy of the letter, and may give it away, sell it, keep it, or even destroy it as he chooses (just as you can sell (or burn) your old copy of The Da Vinci Code even if you are not Dan Brown).
Who owns the physical (or digital) copy of a work isn’t really relevant to who owns the intellectual property, and vice-versa.