MR JUSTICE LA FOREST for the Court:[T]he author would seem to be the person who expresses the ideas in an original or novel form.
... Transferred to the architectural field. the stonemason was not the author of the gothic
cathedral; nor was the cleric who dreamed of an edifice reaching toward heaven. A more homely
example is the relationship of the architect to the builder. ... In the case of a physical structure,
I would have thought the author of the copyright was the person who had devised the
characteristics that made the structure artistically distinctive. ...[I]n addition to the copyright in the structure itself, ... copyright ... may exist in the plans for
the tower. And here there are two sets of plans – the final design of the structure prepared by [the
architect] (of which he is the author) and the detailed structure plans (of which [the engineer] is
the author). ...[T]he trial judge was clearly of the view that it was [the architect] who was responsible for
devising any characteristics that made the tower artistically distinctive, and that may have been
interfered with by the remedial work. Of course, [the engineer] made suggestions, sometimes for
aesthetic but more often for structural reasons, but ... the author is the person who finds
expression for these suggestions in the product. ...[The engineer] had to devise a detailed structural design to construct the tower (and to that
design, of course, he ... has the copyright) , but it is the tower as conceived by [the architect] that
was built.EXAMPLE 2:The plaintiff developed a computer program called “Keyport” with the
assistance of an employee of the defendant. The defendant claimed that its
employee was a joint author of the program. The court disagreed:Fylde Microsystems Ltd v. Key Radio Systems Ltd [1998] F.S.R. 449 (U.K.:
Patents Court)MR JUSTICE LADDIE:It is not disputed that the software was written entirely by the plaintiff or its employees. ...Section 10(1) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 defines a work of joint authorship
as “a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of
each author is not distinct from that of the other author or authors”. This provision does not turn
someone who is not an author into an author. It is concerned to categorise works which are made
from the input of two or more authors. The question to `be answered in this action is whether Mr
Seedle [the plaintiff ’s employee] alone was the author of the whole of KEYPORT or whether
there was also another author, namely Mr Andrew Barrett of the defendant. [It was said in
another case that:]What is protected by copyright in a drawing or a literary work is more than just the
skill of making marks on paper or some other medium. It is both the words or lines
and the skill and effort involved in creating, selecting or gathering together the
detailed concepts, data or emotions which those words or lines have fixed in some
tangible form which is protected. It is wrong to think that only the person who carries(^116) out the mechanical act of fixation is an author. There may well be skill and expertise