An author is any person who creates a certain work over which they will have rights protected by law.. In general, the term refers to producers of reading material, although it can be extended to any creator of software, of pictorial works, of cinema, of music, etc. It is also possible to represent before the law the possibility that two or more people have participated in the realization of any of these activities; this would be a case of co-authorship. In the event that a certain work is created to order, the law considers the third party for whom it is made as the author.
It should be noted that There are two types of legal concepts to refer to the relationship of the author and his work. One is related to copyright, which is based on the criterion that the work is an expression of the author over which he holds moral rights.. The other is related to the right to copy, which excludes this notion of moral right: the author is only recognized as the paternity of a certain production.. The first of these conceptions comes from French law, while the second comes from Anglo-Saxon law.
Copyright protects certain content, but not ideas. The mere act of creating already implies the existence of these rights, without the need to proceed to any formal procedure. Some attributions that only correspond to the author are: reproduction, profit, publicly display the work, etc.
It's important pointing that the notion of author has been widely debated in the academic field as a consequence of these legal regulations. This has led some to suggest that the author is merely a social and legal function and that it is best to avoid associating him with the producer. However, these evaluations are negligible by contributing little to the analysis of the phenomenon in question.
The extensive debate about authorship and rights includes several interesting ramifications. Thus, those works by anonymous authors or transmitted by oral tradition since time immemorial have different characteristics in terms of intellectual property. In general, it is admitted that it is the chosen edition that retains these rights, which remain in the hands of the circumstantial manufacturer. The same occurs with religious textbooks, such as the Bible, the Torah or the Koran, among others and in a non-exclusive way.
On the other hand, the digital revolution has caused strong controversies in relation to the rights of authors. On the one hand, there is a stance of firm combat against the making of illegal copies ("piracy") that began with the software and that would quickly lead to the dissemination of books, music content, videos, films and many other creations of Author. This view is held by many supporters, since, when the economic benefit of the authors is exhausted, the production capacity suffers and many creatives abandon their work. However, a new aspect has begun to gain followers: the generation of micropayments. In this format, the works of an author are available for access after the payment of an almost symbolic sum, with the goal that repeated payments of these characteristics motivate a progressive increase in the income of the author, who, in this way, would continue motivated to produce his creations.
In all cases, it seems important to note that individual rights assist the author in relation to both the economic content and the availability of the material. Thus, when a text is adapted to another format (television, video, cinema), it is only possible to produce the novelty with the consent and the necessary benefit for the original creator. A curious case corresponds to translations, since, while a text is the property of its author, the eventual translation and its summary include their own rights for the translator and the editor of the chosen content.
