Concepts of authorship and their relevance to IP entitlement – personalist vs entrepreneurial approaches

Abstract

There are only two concepts of authorship: the personalist one and the entrepreneurial one. The personalist concept has a normative load. The original copyright must vest in the person of the author. The entrepreneurial concept favours the allocation with entrepreneurs on efficiency grounds. In order to justify this, the principle of labour law is invoked, according to which the fruits of paid labour belong to the employer. Neither of these systems exists in a pure form in positive law. An intermediate solution is found in what we call the labour approach. That approach may still be personalist in essence, but its practice is coloured by entrepreneurial interests. Key for allocation is a balanced application of the concepts of entrepreneur, originality and name.