A Study on Work made for Hire in the Amended Bill of the Copyright Act

Abstract

Recently, discussions on work made for hire, which have been a lot of issues in the past in the field of copyright, are underway again. Furthermore, amendments to work made for hire have been drawn in drafts of the Copyright Act from the viewpoint of the amended Bill as well as the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Works made for hire have been controversial in that they give the authorship to juridical person, not employee of a legal person, as the only exception to the ‘creator principle’, which is the underlying principle in the Copyright Act. Under the circumstances, it is desirable to submit an amendment on work made for hire in the drafts of the Copyright Act from the viewpoints of the amended Bill as well as Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, but there are still insufficient aspects to calm controversy as to work made for hire. It is believed that many domestic scholars have made meaningful suggestions on various issues raised by work made for hire. In this paper, the application of the legal philosophical theory on work made for hire was reviewed, and a regulation on work made for hire in the Korea Copyright Act is comparatively analyzed with the relevant overseas legislations. In addition, the previous researchers' suggestions on work made for hire were analyzed and summarized, and the drafts of the Copyright Act from the viewpoints of the amended Bill as well as Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism were reviewed from a critical point of view. In this regard, I suggested the direction to be amended as to issues on work made for hire in my own way.