In the last few weeks I’ve been updating and posting many of my articles on copyright, trademark, and domain name law from the old Arborlaw website.

The Joint Copyright FAQ is the most updated article of the group — as 21st century creators rip, mix, remix, mashup, and scramble bits and bytes of content into new forms of creative works, copyright authorship and ownership analysis becomes more complicated and the results become more convoluted. As even the average schoolchild knows, copyright law has a ways to go in catching up to the state of the art and the state of technology.

The Joint Copyright FAQ provides general information on copyright joint authorship and joint ownership, so that creative contributors can avoid bad outcomes, seek professional guidance, and ask the right questions — prior to creating circumstances and transactions which limit their options and their rights. The article points out some of the most common “bad outcomes” from a lack of planning. Here’s one:

[T]wo joint owners of a copyrighted work who have not seen each other in years (and who frequently might not be on speaking terms) may be stuck in an indefinite legal relationship where both are actively profiting from a copyright, and are therefore obligated to provide ongoing payments and reporting to each other. This is a terrible legal outcome which usually reflects poor planning or a lack of knowledge about joint ownership laws concerning copyrights.

The Joint Copyright FAQ also identifies the most common situations that cause bad copyright ownership outcomes. Unfortunately, many of these outcomes are created deliberately by professionals, managers and consultants who are unaware of intellectual property consequences created by handling routine legal transactions:

As an experienced copyright attorney who is also a business attorney, I constantly encounter legal situations where managers, attorneys, business consultants and other professionals have set up joint ownership situations in copyrighted works (generally, this happens via disbanding a musical group, negotiating a property settlement in divorce, or in connection with a partnership windup, shareholder buyout, or corporate liquidation). When you consider these examples in the context of this article, it becomes clear that unintended ownership consequences can result, which can prevent a copyrighted work from being effectively marketed and distributed or otherwise commercialized.

Business attorneys who focus on the special needs of creative and technology businesses and individuals will seek to structure these types of transactions without resorting to highly undesirable “joint ownership” outcomes. In upcoming weeks I’ll be posting an article here at Arborlaw that discusses intellectual property strategies in common situations where private companies and partnerships must distribute or otherwise dispose of intellectual property rights.