Copyright and Collective Authorship: Locating the Authors of Collaborative Work

As technology makes it easier for people to work together, large-scale collaboration is becoming increasingly prevalent. In this context, the question of how to determine authorship – and hence ownership – of copyright in collaborative works is an important question to which current copyright law fails to provide a coherent or consistent answer. In Copyright and Collective Authorship, Daniela Simone engages with the problem of how to determine the authorship of highly collaborative works. Employing insights from the ways in which collaborators understand and regulate issues of authorship, the book argues that a recalibration of copyright law is necessary, proposing an inclusive and contextual approach to joint authorship that is true to the legal concept of authorship but is also more aligned with creative reality.

• Incorporates four case studies (to exemplify the mismatch between creative norms in environments in which collaboration evidently flourishes and copyright law's rules on authorship
• Provides a fresh perspective on the doctrinal problem of applying the joint authorship test
• Identifies the ways in which collaborators understand and regulate authorship as between themselves, and then applies this insight to provide a critically evaluation of copyright law's approach to authorship