Term
Copyright
Protection of a work, such as a text, photo, software or design, arising from its creation without registration. A company may use the work only under a licence or where it is an employee work.
Updated
What it means
Copyright protects the result of an author’s creative work: text, photographs, graphics, music, video, computer programs and databases. It arises automatically the moment the work is expressed in a perceivable form, with no registration and no © symbol needed.
The author holds moral rights, such as the right to be named as author, which cannot be transferred, and economic rights, meaning the right to use the work and to authorise others to do so. Economic rights last for the author’s life and 70 years after their death.
In Slovakia economic rights cannot be sold, only licensed. A company therefore never buys the work itself but obtains a licence setting the manner, scope, territory and duration of use, and whatever the licence does not mention does not belong to the company.
How it works in practice
The exception is an employee work created by an employee as part of their job. The employer exercises the economic rights to it and needs no separate licence. That does not apply to work agreements or external suppliers, and without a licence the company cannot, for example, modify its logo or website.
When commissioning a website, logo, copy or software we therefore put an exclusive licence into the contract for work covering all forms of use, unlimited in time, with the right to modify and sublicense the work. This matters most for software, where without a licence to the source code the company remains dependent on the supplier.
An acquired licence is booked, depending on its price and period of use, as an expense or as an intangible fixed asset. An author who is an individual taxes the fee as income from use of a work and for small amounts may opt for withholding tax.
What to watch out for
The most common dispute concerns photos and images downloaded from the internet for a website or social media. Freely available does not mean free to use, and for use without a licence the author can claim reasonable remuneration and damages, often several times the normal licence fee.
Copyright protects a specific expression, not an idea, a title or a trade name. A trademark protects a name and logo against competitors, confidentiality agreements protect know-how, and royalties paid abroad come with tax rules of their own.
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