This work is licensed under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Copyright is the right exercised by the creator over his/her literary and artistic work. The owner of the copyright is, as a rule, the person who creates the work, which is to say the author. In Copyright Law, the author is considered to be “the natural person who creates a literary, artistic or scientific piece of work”.  Although in principle it is only natural or physical persons who may be considered to be authors, the law foresaw certain cases in which legal persons could also benefit from these rights.

Authorship is irrevocable; it may not be transmitted either inter vivos or in the form of a testamentary trust; it does not disappear with the passage of time nor is it public domain; it is not subject to the statute of limitations.

Copyright Law has a dual nature; it covers moral rights (paternity, integrity, dissemination…), and property rights (reproduction, distribution, public communication, transformation):

Moral rights (article 14 of the Spanish Copyright Law). These refer to acknowledgement of authorship. They are irrevocable and inalienable and correspond to the right to:

•   Decide whether his/her work is to be disseminated and how.


•   Acknowledge authorship of the work.


•   Demand respect for the integrity of the work.


•   Modify the work while being respectful of the rights acquired.


•   Withdraw the work from sale, without prejudice to compensation for damages to the owners of the right of use.


•   Access the single,unique copy of the work that is held by a third party

Property rights (articles 18 to 25 of the Spanish Copyright Law). They refer to the four types of right of use. They allow the owner of the work to obtain financial compensation for the third-party use of his/her work:

• Reproduction: obtaining of copies of all or part of the work.


• Distribution: the public availability of the work through its sale, rental, loan or by any other means.


• Public Communication: action through which a group of people may have access to the work.


• Transformation: the translation, adaptation and any other modification of the work, leading, or not, to new work derived from it.