Copyright and Digital Works

Under the Berne Convention copyright arises automatically when an original work is created — no registration or formality is required for protection to exist. Registration is not constitutive, but it provides strong evidence of authorship and of the date of creation, which is valuable if ownership is ever disputed. We advise on when registration and other dated records are worth putting in place.

Registration before the Spanish Registro de la Propiedad Intelectual is voluntary and creates an official, dated record of authorship and of the existence of the work. It does not create the right — that already exists from creation — but it shifts the practical burden of proof in your favour in a dispute. We handle the registration and keep the evidentiary record consistent across your catalogue.

In the European Union the economic rights generally last for the life of the author plus seventy years after their death, after which the work enters the public domain. Different rules apply to certain works, such as those of joint authorship or works owned by legal entities. We advise on the term that applies to each work in your portfolio.

In Europe software is protected primarily by copyright, which covers the source and object code as a literary work. Patents are available only in limited cases for inventions with a genuine technical character, not for software as such. In practice, protecting software well is a contractual exercise — licensing, SaaS terms and open source compliance — which is where most of the value and the risk sit.

It depends on the relationship and the contract. For employees, economic rights in certain works (notably software) may pass to the employer by default, but this should never be assumed for commissioned work from a freelancer, where rights stay with the author unless they are assigned in writing. We put proper assignment and chain-of-title arrangements in place so you actually own what you paid for.

Moral rights protect the personal link between an author and their work — principally the right to be recognised as the author and to object to distortions of the work. In Spain and much of continental Europe they belong to the author, and the core of them cannot be assigned or waived, even when the economic rights are transferred. We draft agreements that respect moral rights while securing the exploitation rights you need.

Enforcement usually escalates from a cease and desist letter and notice-and-takedown requests to online platforms, through customs measures against infringing physical goods, up to infringement proceedings before the courts. The right step depends on who the infringer is and where they are. We coordinate the strategy and act, or instruct local litigators, across the jurisdictions involved.

Largely, yes. Most countries in both regions are members of the Berne Convention, so your work is protected automatically without local registration, on broadly equivalent terms to local authors. Enforcement, however, is local: we coordinate correspondent counsel to register where useful and to act against infringement across the Europe–Latin America–Africa corridor.