ISRAEL Law and Practice Contributed by: Ronit Barzik-Soffer, Luiz Blanc and Rakefet Peled, Reinhold Cohn Group
is not intended to be used for industrial manu- facture. 3.2 Essential Elements of Copyright Protection The elements required to qualify for copyright protection for artistic works, dramatic works or musical works are “originality”, “fixation” and a connection of the work to Israel: • “Originality” is not defined in the Copyright Act. Court cases have addressed the ques - tion of originality, moving along the years from a “labour” doctrine (minimum amount of work and effort) to a “creativity” doctrine (minimum intellectual contribution), and lately requiring both labour and creativity as a condition to copyright. • “Fixation” – this rule has evidentiary pur - poses. • The Copyright Act protects works that have a certain “connection to Israel”. This means: (i) the work was first published in Israel; or (ii) at the time of the work’s creation, its author was a citizen of the State of Israel, or their habitual residence was in Israel, regardless of whether the work was published in Israel. In addition, if a treaty has been signed between Israel and another country, or if Israel has joined a treaty in this regard, the minister of justice may determine that works whose protection is required by the treaty in Israel, will be protected according to the provisions of the treaty. 3.3 Copyright Authorship The Copyright Act stipulates that: • The author of a work is the first owner of copyright in the work and the producer of a sound recording is the first owner of copy - right in a sound recording.
• In works created by employees, the employer is the first owner of copyright in a work made by an employee in the course of their service and during the period of their service, unless otherwise agreed. • Regarding works made for hire – in a work made pursuant to a commission, the first owner of the copyright will be the author, unless otherwise agreed between the com - missioning party and the author, expressly or by implication. However, regarding commis - sioned works, such as a portrait or a photo - graph of a family event or other private event, the first owner of the copyright therein will be the commissioning party, unless otherwise agreed. The Copyright Act does not include any refer - ence to work that was not created by a human (eg, work created by AI software, an animal, etc) and Israeli courts have not yet addressed this issue. Joint Authorship “Joint work” means a work created by several authors jointly, in which it is not possible to dis - cern each author’s part in the work. Usually, joint work will be co-owned by its joint authors. There is no special rule in the Act regarding the use of a joint work but, according to court cases, the general rules of property apply – accordingly, each one of the co-owners has the right to “rea - sonable use” of the property, subject to payment The rights granted to copyright owners, as detailed in Section 11 of the Copyright Act, state that the copyright owner of a work has an exclusive right to perform the following acts in respect of the work, or a substantial part thereof, as follows: to the other co-owners. 3.4 Copyright Rights
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