Severed in half（copyright law/joint authors/remuneration/audit）

Severed in half（copyright law/joint authors/remuneration/audit）

Li Dongtao

Description: Co-authors of a work should prove their respective contributions.

The case

The best of remembrance,

severed in half¹

This is a case about “HALF”.

The plaintiff and the defendant are joint authors of the book Auditing Systems All Over The World. The book gives a brief introduction to auditing systems all over the world and some international treaties.

In May 1993, the book was published; the authors were the plaintiff and the defendant, but they failed to define which contents had been written by each contributor.

In August 1993, the defendant drew the remuneration for the book from the publishing house but did not inform the plaintiff.

The plaintiff sued the defendant for copyright infringement and requested the defendant to pay him half of the remuneration.

The defendant argued that the copyright infringement was not established because the plaintiff had agreed to the publication of the book and the defendant had written most parts of the book, so the remuneration couldn’t be divided equally.

In the court hearing, the plaintiff also claimed that he had written most parts of the book.

Analysis

The remuneration for the book should be divided equally between the two parties.

Where a work is created jointly by two or more co-authors, the copyright of the work shall be entitled to both of them, including the right to remuneration.

In essence, the contents of Auditing Systems All Over The World couldn’t be separated, without any country, this book couldn’t be entitled “ALL OVER THE WORLD”; however, one thing could be divided: the remuneration.

If one of the concerned parties could have defined the part he had written, he would have gotten the corresponding amount of remuneration based on calculating the ratio between the words in this part and the total number of words in the book.

Unfortunately, neither the plaintiff nor the defendant could bring evidence to prove the precise number of the words he had written, so the remuneration for the book had to be divided equally between them.

In short, the best solution of the case, severed in half.

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