The basis of copyright protection is to confer on the owner of the copyrighted work certain financial compensation or reward for his labour and intellectual contribution to the field of knowledge alongside confer moral right on such owner.
Pursuant to Section 11 of the Copyright Act,copyright is transmissible like tangible or movable property.Copyright work can be transferred, assigned and licensed to another person.Thus transfer or assignment or licensing is allowed under the Nigeria copyright Law.
Section 10 of the Copyright Act provide that Copyright shall be initially vested on the Author of the work.Generally, the author of the copyrighted work is the person who created the work. An author is the person who put the ideas of the copyrighted work in a expressive form. Thus he is entitled to both the financial reward and the moral reward(that is recognition of been the owner and author of the work).
The question is that is the owner of a copyrighted work necessarily the author of the work. In DONOGHUE V. ALLIED NEWSPAPER, the court defined an author as a person who create the work or made the production of the work possible. He is the person who originate the prosecutable element of the work or the person who is responsible for the creation,selection or gathering together the detailed concepts, data or emotion which are found in the work.He is often but not necessarily a human being.
The owner of a copyrighted work, on the other hand ,is the person, whether human or Juristic ,on whom the right to exercise copyright control is vested upon.
There are circumstances where an author of a copyrighted work would not be the owner of the copyrighted work.One of such circumstances is when an employee create a work during the course of employment, the authorship lies with the employee but the employer is the owner of the copyrighted work. This is based on the rationale that the employer take d risk of financing the work therefore the benefit should be given to him.
Also when a work is commissioned to a person,the one who commissioned the work to another becomes the owner while the person who is commissioned is the author.Commissioning involved ordering a work to be done and an obligation to pay for the work done. This was considered in APPLE CORP.LTD V.COOPER.
Even where the author assigned or licence a copyrighted work ,he still remains the author of the work.The person he license or assigned the work to becomes the owner of the work.The question of Authorship is a question of Law and fact.It is predetermined by Law and the parties involved may not by agreement shift the authorship. It is important to note that the moral value/benefit /right is retain by the author while the financial right lies with the owner of the copyrighted work.