Newsletter
LIFE OF COPYRIGHT IN JOINT WORKS
The Copyright Department of the Intellectual Property Office recently issued a written opinion on how the length of economic right to a joint work should be calculated in cases where both natural and juristic persons are joint authors of a work. Article 31 of the Copyright Law provides that "economic rights to a joint work shall subsist for fifty years after the death of the last surviving author." The legislative intent of this provision is to unify the period of economic right to a work enjoyed by each co-author of a joint work, and this is achieved by taking the longest period of economic right to a work enjoyed by an indi-vidual author as the period of joint economic right to a work. To avoid differences in the life of economic right to a work where the work is co-authored by both natural and juristic persons, the period should be calculated according to Ar-ticles 30 (life of an individual author plus 50 years after his death, or 33 (50 years after pub-lication in case of a juristic person) of the Copy-right Law, and, applying Article 31 by analogy, the longest period so calculated should be taken as the period of joint economic right to a work.