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Common licensing mistakes

Management and licensing of public sector intellectual property is a difficult area. Mistakes commonly made include:

Failure to identify correctly the legal entity able to own copyright, and enter into contracts to give or receive licences; a committee or project is not a legal entity.
Assumption that a statutory body owns copyright in materials generated by it - which is not always true.
Failure to differentiate "background intellectual property" and "foreground intellectual property" - need to scrutinise the definition of "Contract Material" in a contract.
Assumption that the generation of an extra layer of material which qualifies for copyright protection necessarily extinguishes prior rights. This is not correct.
Grants from more than one State/Commonwealth Department/agency to a single organisation relating to development of similar material - may have inconsistent provisions re copyright.
Tendency in some cases to favour joint ownership - not necessarily a good idea. It is often not appreciated that each joint owner requires permission of the other to use and commercialise the material. It may be a better idea for one party to own the copyright and the other to take a non-exclusive licence.
Failure to appreciate that the transaction amounts to a licensing activity at all. A licence may be written, oral or implied. Sale of learning materials may imply a licence to deal with those materials in a copyright sense in certain ways.

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