Authorship, ownership, wikiship: copyright in the twenty-first century
J. Phillips · Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice · 2008
This article examines the application of copyright and database rights to the ownership and authorship of multi-authored ‘works in progress’, focusing on the ‘wiki’ and highlighting some of the problems that exist in theory and whether they cause difficulty in practice or not. The word ‘wiki’ is not a legal term of art. For the purpose of this article, it may be understood as meaning ‘a website or similar online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively’. The author explores the notion of the wiki as copyright work and as sui generis work. At the time of writing, the wiki is still awaiting its first European copyright and/or sui generis database right cause célèbre. The author argues that battles will remain to be fought in those situations in which consensus is impossible to obtain, where moral rights of identifiable authors are traversed and where the terms of consent to otherwise unauthorized use are abused or ignored.