Pecularities of Protection and Legal Regime of Official Works in the Field of Lighting Design

Abstract

The legal regime of official works has a complex dichotomous construction. The issues connected with the creation of an official work are subject to the labour law, while the issues of official work usage are governed by copyright. The protection issues of lighting design works have their own characteristics due to technical, artistic creativity and use of special technologies. These objects are subject to copying, and because of this fact a lot of legal issues in the field of not only copyright, but contract law arise. The authors of the article aim to determine the signs of creativity for the recognition of a lighting design work as an object of copyright; to develop the criteria for assessing the identity of a design work, created under a contract, and the result of creative activity, the rights to which are transferred to the customer; to identify subjects of copyright for lighting design works. The article uses special legal methods (comparative legal method, formal­legal method and system analysis of legal phenomena method). On the assumption of Article 1295 provisions of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, it can be concluded that it is possible to conclude an agreement on granting the employer the exclusive right to official lighting works, which were not yet created at the time of concluding such an agreement. The absence of a direct prohibition on the transfer or alienation of the exclusive right in respect of a future work may lead to the probability of recognizing such a contract as not concluded due to the inconsistency of its subject matter. In foreign jurisdictions, there is a ban on inclusion in the agreement of the condition on the result of intellectual activity not yet created (future works). At the same time, in advance to accurately identify the official work, which is to be created by the employee during his labour activity, should not deprive of legal force the contract on the use of official works by the employer. The article proves that the lack of definiteness of the subject, provided that such a subject can be classified as definable, does not entail recognition of this contract as not concluded, and its subject matter is not harmonized.