Copyright Law

Copyright law most notably protects the author of a creation regarding his interests in using and exploiting his creation. Special protection is granted regarding public reproduction, distribution, translation, modification etc.

While it is not possible to alienate the copyright law itself, it is possible to alienate the patent rights for a creation. This is usually done by a licence contract.

Rendering a personal intellectual creation is decisive in order to obtain copyright protection. However, the idea alone is not yet enough. It also has to have made an outward appearance, e.g. by the way of a picture, a text, a movie etc.

Copyright law starts with the creation of a work and ends 70 years after the death of the author.

While the copyright notice at the usual place, e.g. the copyright notice with the name mentioned at the end of a text, is not mandatory for the origin of copyright protection, it has the advantage of automatic presumption of copyright tenure for the author, so the author won’t have to prove his creatorship anymore. This implicates that, under certain circumstances, any third party will have to provide full rebuttal evidence in order to contest the creatorship.