Intellectual property

The owner of the work is the natural or legal person who publishes and disseminates it under their own name.

For example, a magazine can contain the works of columnists, photographers, contributors and so on. However, each author's individual authorship of their individual contribution to the collective work is acknowledged when taken individually, but such contributors are not considered authors of the collective work. 

All the authors involved in the creation of the work are considered its co-authors and share the authors' rights.

For example, in an illustrated book, one person may have provided the text and another the images. In a film or audiovisual work, the director, producer, screenwriters and composers of the original soundtrack are all treated as authors.

Moral rights are those that enable the authorship of a work to be recognized and to oppose the fact of this authorship being changed in a way that may damage the reputation of the creator.

These rights are irrevocable and inalienable and will always stay with the author of a work and their heirs when the author has died.

They are defined in Article 14 of the Intellectual Property Act:

To decide whether the work should be disseminated and in what form.

To determine whether this dissemination should be done under their own name, under a pseudonym or sign, or anonymously.

To demand the recognition of their status as author of the work.

To demand respect for the integrity of the work.

To modify the work, respecting the rights acquired by third persons.

To withdraw the work from the market.

To access the sole or rare copy of the work when it is in the possession of another.

In order to observe moral rights, the author and the source of the work must always be cited. 

Usage rights are those that permit the rights holder to receive remuneration for the use of their works by third persons.

They include the following rights:

• Reproduction right: this includes any form of reproduction, such as photocopying, printing, scanning, photographing, etc.
• Distribution right: this is making the original or the copies of the work available to the public, on tangible media, by means of its sale, rental or loan.
• Public communication right: this is any act whereby a number of people can have access to the work without the prior distribution of copies to each one of them. The communication is not considered to be public when it is held in a strictly domestic sphere that is not part of or connected to a dissemination network of any type. Posting the work on the Internet would be a public communication act.
• Transformation right: this comprises the translation, adaptation and any other modification to the form of the work in such a way that a different one is derived from it.

The author has the exclusive usage right in relation to their work but, unlike in the case of moral rights, economic rights can be transferred – exclusively or otherwise – to third parties, such as publishers or audiovisual production companies. The use of these works will require either permission from these rightsholders or a usage licence from organizations known as collection societies, such as CEDRO, VEGAP or SGAE in Spain. Third parties wishing to use a particular work must either obtain the author's express consent or fall under one of the exceptions to authors' rights provided by law.

Therefore, permission from the holder of the rights must usually be obtained (often for payment) before copying, transforming or disseminating a work in order to comply with the author's economic rights. However, there are many exceptions to this requirement for permission, particularly in the field of education.

For example, no one is allowed to publish a translation of a book without permission from the holder of the transformation rights, who is usually the publisher of the original work. Notwithstanding, thanks to the exceptions applicable to the world of education, it is perfectly possible to add, without the need for permission, a photograph of a famous painting such as Velázquez's Las Meninas in an exercise describing this work or comparing it with other works. 

This consists of the inclusion in one's own work of excerpts from other works of any kind. They must be works that are already disseminated (ie already in circulation) and the inclusion must be by way of a citation or for their analysis, comment or critical opinion. This use may only be made for teaching or research purposes, in the justified measure for the aim of this inclusion and stating the source and the name of the author of the work.

In the case of photographs, it is possible to use the entire photograph under citation rights, providing the conditions required by law are met.

This limit, the citation right, is the one most commonly used at universities by both students and teaching staff. In order to exercise it correctly, you must follow the citing recommendations. 

Teaching staff in formal education settings may carry out acts of reproduction, distribution and public communication of small excerpts of works, excluding university handbooks and textbooks, without authorization, if this is done in class for the purpose of illustrating their education activities, provided that the works have already been disseminated and the author's name and their source are mentioned, unless such mention is technically impossible.

The UOC is firmly committed to respecting intellectual property rights. This commitment can be seen in the agreements concluded by the University with rightholders for the use of resources outside the classroom and also in the licences agreed with CEDRO and the resulting financial remuneration for the creators of the work and the publishing industry. The UOC was the first university in Spain to regulate the use of resources in the classroom with this collection society, and no university in Spain allocates more financial resources to this than the UOC.

This is a type of software license that permits the copying, distribution (commercial or otherwise) and modification of the source code, providing that any modification continues to be distributed under the same license.

It is a license that is used more in the area of software and ensures the end users the freedom to use, study, share (copy) and modify the software.

Its aim is to declare that the software covered by the license is free software and to protect it from attempts at appropriation that restrict these freedoms to users.

The GNU LGPL license (formerly known as the GNU Library General Public License) allows the freedom to share and modify the software to be guaranteed, ensuring that the software is free for all its users.

It permits the same as the GNU, but the main difference with the GPL license is that the LGPL can be linked to a non-GLP program, which may be free software or non-free software.

A work is protected by authors' rights by the mere fact of its creation: it does not require registration or any other formalities. However, some laws and national government authors' rights offices do provide for the registration of the works. These systems help address the issues that can arise, among others, from disputes relating to ownership or creation, sales or assignments and transfers of rights, as they provide evidence and publicity of the rights registered in them.

In Catalonia, the office in charge of such matters is the Registre de la Propietat Intel·lectual de Catalunya (Intellectual Property Register of Catalonia). Although there is only one register for the whole of Spain, it is decentralized and split into regional registers.

In spite of being generally protected under the Intellectual Property Law, software is – just like literary, artistic or scientific works – an intangible asset requiring legal protection. The instructions that together make up a piece of software are the product of human ingenuity. This means that both the programs themselves and their creators must be effectively protected.

The protection of computer programs by authors' rights has come about due to the realization that the protection provided by patents is insufficient. The rights on computer programs, their successive versions and derivative programs may be registered in the Intellectual Property Register.

The characteristic features of the current protection are as follows:

• Registration is not mandatory.
• It is presumed that whoever appears in the Register as rights holder of the program is the real rights holder, so the onus is on anyone disputing this point to prove otherwise. Registration is not taken into account to determine the start of the program protection period.

Although it is true to say that registration with the Intellectual Property Register is very often complicated and not of any great use in terms of source code, there are other alternatives for protecting this.

A trademark is a distinctive sign that indicates that certain goods or services have been produced or provided by a specific person or company. Article 4 of Law 17/2001, of 7 December 2001, on trademarks, defines it as "any sign of graphic representation that serves to distinguish one company's products or services from those of another".

Protection of the trademark is obtained through registering it, and in some countries also through its use.

Although trademarks can be protected by their use, it is advisable to register them by submitting the relevant application to the appropriate office according to whether the registration is national, EU or international. Registration of a trademark will provide greater protection, especially in cases where there is a dispute with an identical trademark or one that is so similar that it may cause confusion.

Therefore, although it is not compulsory to register the trademark, it is advisable, since this grants exclusive rights that prohibit the unauthorized use of the trademark.

A patent is a series of exclusive rights that guarantee the right to operate as exclusive the invention made for a limited amount of time, which is twenty years in the case of Spain.

In Spain, it is regulated by Law 24/2015, of 24 July, on patents.

For an invention to be covered by a patent, it has to fulfil three requirements:

Novel: an invention is considered as new when it is not included in the state of the art, ie when it has not been published prior to the date of submission of the application.

Inventive step: it is considered that an invention involves an inventive step if it does not result from the state of the art in a way that is evident to an expert in the matter.

Industrial application: it is considered that an invention is enabled for industrial application when the subject of the invention can be manufactured or used in any class of industry, including agriculture.

In accordance with the requirement of being novel, a research result cannot be published before patenting it, as a publication prior to the submission of the patent application would result in the loss of the novelty of the invention, which would then become non-patentable.

Utility models protect inventions of a lower inventive rank than those protected by patents, consisting of providing an object with a configuration or structure from which a utility or practical advantage for its use or manufacture is derived. For example, a mop bucket.

The device, instrument or tool that can be protected by the utility model is characterized by its "utility" and "practicality".

A domain name is the Internet address of a company, organization, association or person that allows their information and their products and services to be accessible worldwide over the Internet.

There are three levels of Internet domains:

1. Top-level domains.
   • Generic: These are the ones ending in ".com", ".gov", ".edu", ".org", etc. and they are allocated by institutions designated by the ICANN.
   • Country code: these are the ones that identify the country, such as ".es" and ".ny".
2. Second-level domains: this is the name that is registered when applying for a domain, eg in uoc.edu, "uoc" is the second-level domain.
3. Third-level domains: ".com.es", ".nom.es", ".org.es", ".gob.es" and ".edu.es".

Not usually. Works include any original literary, artistic or scientific creation expressed by any method or on any medium, be it tangible or intangible, that is currently known or that may be invented in future.

The author of a work enjoys all the benefits provided by the law from the moment of its creation, and therefore does not need to do anything else to protect their rights: no one may use a work without the necessary authorization of the people who created it.

However, there are various systems for the registration and identification of works:

• Intellectual Property Register
• Safe Creative
• Legal deposit
• ISBN/ISSN
• Other: document repositories

The Intellectual Property Register

The Intellectual Property Register is an agency envisaged in the Intellectual Property Act, conceived as one of the systems for protecting intellectual property rights through the proof and the publicity of the rights that are registered with it.

For the work to be protected, it is not necessary to register it with the Intellectual Property Register, as the work is protected due to the sole fact of its creation. Therefore, registration is declaratory, not constituent.

The advantages offered by registering with the Register are that it provides qualified proof that the rights registered exist and belong to their holder, except in the case where the opposite is proven, and publicity is given to the rights registered.

Safe Creative

Safe Creative is a private register of contents on digital media.

For authors, registering their work with Safe Creative is the proof of authorship of a register with irrefutable technological guarantees: deposit of the work, registration of multiple digital imprints and double time stamping; for the users of the works it provides certainty about the license and permitted uses.

Since registration with a public register is not compulsory in order to acquire intellectual property rights or to obtain the protection that the law provides to authors and other intellectual property rights holders, registering the material in a private register, as in the case of Safe Creative, offers evidence of authorship. The essential purpose of registration is to be able to show that a work has been created before that of a third person for the purposes of proving its originality.

To this effect, users can register their works using the service and leave a record of their authorship and intellectual property rights, since the aim of all of this is to provide a mechanism of proof in the event of cases of plagiarism or improper use of works of intellectual property.

Legal deposit

Legal deposit is the obligation for printers and publishers to deposit copies of all of their publications of all types disseminated on any medium with the aim of collecting and preserving all the production published in Spain and enable access to it. Authors who self-publish their works also have this obligation.

ISBN (International Standard Book Number)

The ISBN is a unique numerical identifier created for every book, based on a standardized combination of numbers that indicate a country or original language code, the publisher, the number of the article and check digits, which permits the identification of any book and the use of IT tools to locate it.

The ISBN is allocated by the Spanish ISBN Agency to publishers or authors who self-publish the works.

ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)

The ISSN is an internationally recognized numerical code for the identification of serial publications (journals, yearbooks, newsletters, collections of dossiers, etc.).

The National ISSN Centre of the country of publication is responsible for allocating this number. In Spain, it is based in the National Library.

When a journal is published in paper and electronic format, a different ISSN number is allocated for each format.

Identifiers of works in print format:

• ISBN (International Standard Book Number)
• ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)
• NIPO (Official Publication Identification Number)
• ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number)
• ISMN (International Standard Music Number)
• ISRC (International Standard Recording Code)
• ISWC (International Standard Work Code)

Identifiers of works in digital format:

• HANDLE and DOI
• PURL
• SICI