Register of anonymous and pseudonymous works

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The register of anonymous and pseudonymous works is a directory maintained by the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) in Munich , in which authors of anonymous or pseudonymous works can store their civil names . The register is expressly provided for in the German Copyright Act; its legal basis is § 138 UrhG. Until 2001 it was referred to there as the “author's role” .

function

According to § 13 UrhG, authors can freely decide whether and, if so, which author's designation - the civil name or a pseudonym - should be attached to the works they have created. According to § 66 UrhG, however, copyright generally expires 70 years after the author's death ( standard protection period ). This would give rise to the problem that users of the work could not determine the expiry of this period because, due to the anonymous or pseudonymous nature of the work, they would not be able to identify the author, let alone determine the date of his death. The copyright law takes this case into account by the fact that according to § 66 Abs. 1 UrhG the protection of anonymous or pseudonymous works expires 70 years after their publication (alternatively creation). For the author this often results in a considerable shortening of the copyright protection compared to the standard protection period.

The author of the anonymous or pseudonymous work can protect himself from this in three ways ( Section 66 (2) UrhG): Either he reveals his identity afterwards and makes it known so that the work user can assign the work to a specific person again; or the pseudonym used by him is already so well known that there can be no doubt about his identity from the outset. Finally, the third way of securing the standard protection period is to have his work and his real name entered in a specially created directory, the Register of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Works, and in this way ensure that users can find out his identity.

Procedure

The entry is made upon written request to the DPMA. According to Section 1 of the Ordinance on the Register of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Works (WerkeRegV), the real name, date of birth, if applicable the pseudonym used, the work title (or, if no title is available, another description), if applicable the Indicate the publisher in which the work was published and the time and form of the first publication. The DPMA only checks the conclusiveness of the information; it does not check in detail whether the applicant is authorized to register, nor whether his information is correct ( § 138 Abs. 1 S. 2 UrhG). The entry is chargeable. Since 2002, the fees for registering a work set out in Section 5 of the WorksRegV have been 12 euros (as of August 2016); when registering further works, their registration is degressive. If the application for registration is rejected, the decision can be challenged before the Munich Higher Regional Court .

A new entry is made public in the Federal Gazette ( Section 138 (3) UrhG); Anyone can inspect the register ( Section 138 (4) UrhG).

meaning

The register of anonymous and pseudonymous works is of little importance in practice. At the end of 2014, the register recorded a total of 738 works by 401 authors. There was only one new entry in 2016 (2015: 3).

Web links

literature

  • S. Knefel: Experience with the patent registration process for copyrights . In: Commercial legal protection and copyright . tape 70 , no. 7 , 1968, p. 352-355 .
  • Martin Otto: From author roles and secondary air issues: A legal historical approach to anonymous authorship in Germany . In: Stephan Pabst (Ed.): Anonymity and authorship: On the literary and legal history of namelessness (=  studies and texts on the social history of literature ). De Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-023771-9 , pp. 265-287 .
  • Rainer Schulte: The author's role at the German Patent Office . In: UFITA . tape 50 , 1967, p. 32-38 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ See also Katzenberger / Metzger in Schricker / Loewenheim, Copyright , 5th edition 2017, § 66 Rn. 19th
  2. ↑ Dreier in Dreier / Schulze, Copyright Law, 5th edition 2015, § 138 Rn. 5.
  3. ↑ § 138 Abs. 2 S. 5 UrhG; Dreier in Dreier / Schulze, Copyright Act, 5th edition 2015, § 138 Rn. 8th.
  4. ↑ Dreier in Dreier / Schulze, Copyright Law, 5th edition 2015, § 138 Rn. 3; Kirchmaier in Büscher / Dittmer / Schiwy, industrial property rights and copyright, 3rd edition 2015, § 138 UrhG Rn. 2.
  5. ↑ German Patent and Trademark Office, Annual Report 2014 (PDF file, 6.1 MB), accessed on July 25, 2017, p. 37.
  6. ↑ German Patent and Trademark Office, Annual Report 2016 (PDF file, 7.1 MB), accessed on July 25, 2017, p. 104.