Authors’ Remuneration: Reforms To Wish For

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2022

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803922256.00013

Abstract

In Intellectual Property Law, authors' works remuneration has represented a significative problem, insofar as, being authors the weaker party of the transaction with intermediaries, the imbalance of bargaining power may allow the grantee to reap disproportionately greater rewards than the authors receive from the works' exploitation. The 2019 European Union Digital Single Market Directive employs several these techniques in order to protect authors against such negative imbalances, but it also contains several inefficiencies. Some attempt of reforms proposal should be made for addressing such negative imbalances and hence enhancing authors' protection in such a matter (e.g., Articles 18-21 of the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive). However, it is not always clear when a grant presents an issue of substantive copyright law, as opposed to one of contract law. The former leads to the application of multiple territorial copyright laws, and the latter to the law chosen by the parties to the contract. In a multi-territorial grant of rights, there is no fixed answer to that question: characterization of the issue as one of contract or of copyright is a matter for the law of the forum. The ability of an exploiter to elude national author-protective laws thus may turn on the exploiter's inclusion in the contract of a forum selection clause designating a forum that will classify the scope of the grant and/or the means of the transfer of rights as matters of contract law. In order to address this issue, one prospect solution could be to envisage local mandatory rules to intervene, while another solution may be represented in the International Law Association's Guidelines on Intellectual Property and Private International Law.

Disciplines

Intellectual Property Law | Law

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS