Two schools of IP rights

There are two different schools of intellectual property rights law. One is European system and the other is Anglo-American system. The Anglo-American system only covers the use of authors economic rights ( varalised õigused ) related to the intellectual property.

The European law system on the other hand differenciates the economic rights and the authors moral rights ( isiklikud õigused ). Moral rights are the aouthors right to be an author , the right to be called an author of the piece, the right to change or not to change the intellectual property item or its appendixes, it also involves the right to protect authors good name.

Moral rights also involve the authors right to say whether or not certain IP item should be published and distributed and made public or not so. Moral rights can not be separated from the person who created the piece and also they can not be transferred to anyone else.

The American system gives all these rights also to the owner of economic rights. This means that the owner of property rights also has the right to do whatever he or she wants with the protected piece.

European system of IP in general presumes that employees who are also authors must transfer their pieces economic rights to the employer.

In some countries it is done so automatically, some other countries ( Finland, France , Germany ) demand that the employer and employee must make a separate agreement on whether or not the employer has the right to economic rights of its employees pieces or not. But even in these countries there is exeption made which is related to the software industry - all the software related works economic rights belong to the empoyers by law also in these countries.

Si it can be said that these two schools of IP laws are not that much different in case of software industry - usually the economic rights belong to the employer. If it werent so I would assume that it would bring and endless flow of court cases where the bitter ex-employees of software companies claim their rights to the software businesses and it would take very long time for the courts to analyse and prove who invented what and who can sell what. In that case a software-lawyers-industry would have beem created - and that court battle industry would produce no good at all to anyone.

So the exception made in the European software industry - that employers get all the economic rights to the software that is produced by the employees - was a wis thing to do. May be Americans are even wiser - as they dont bother with the authors moral rights at all.