Perception of a work
‘Perception of a work’ simply means to take notice of a work, i.e. reading, looking at, listening to a work, etc. (Hilty, Urheberrecht, 2011, 128). This is always permitted.
3.1 Author
Authors do not necessarily need to create a work under their real name. Anonymous authors or those who created a work under a pseudonym are also authors. Only authors can decide whether and how they want to be mentioned in the work.
Authors can also create a work on behalf of someone else (e.g. ghostwriters), in which case, they are still the author – there is no such thing as ‘proxy authorship’.
GOOD TO KNOW
Other parties involved in copyright
Logically, copyright does not only address the author. Several parties have an interest in a created work:
- The author creates the work and possibly also wants to be paid for their work;
- Agents who are known as mediators of copyrighted work help authors to make their work available to the public (e.g. publishing houses). As mediators usually require authors to assign rights to them, they are also owners of rights;
- Users of a work (or users) wish to ‘consume’ the work, i.e. either just enjoy the work, which is termed perception of a work (e.g. listen to, look at, read), or use the work in some other form (e.g. reproduce, distribute).
FAQ
3.1-1 A student is working on their master’s thesis. Does the university automatically acquire the copyright in the master’s thesis?
No, the copyright can only originate with the student.
3.1-3 For a project, magazine articles should be digitised and indexed by applying the principles of computational linguistics (a software ‘reads’ the words in the articles to collect and analyse text data). Does this qualify as perception of a work?
No, perception of a work only means that a natural person (human being) is taking notice of a work (in this case reading a work), not a computer.