TITLE	Supreme Court Decision 2014Da5333 Decided August 17, 2016¡¼Damages, etc.¡½ [full Text]
Summary
[1] In cases where an author¡¯s property right to a derivative work is transferred without a separate expression of intent to transfer the author¡¯s property right to the original work, whether the latter right is transferred in tandem as a matter of course (negative), and in cases where the author¡¯s property right to the derivative work acquired by the transferee includes the right to author a secondary derivative work based on the primary derivative work, the exercise of which entails the exploitation of the original work, whether the transferee is required either to assume the author¡¯s property right to the original work from the copyright holder of the original work or to otherwise acquire authorization to exploit the original work (affirmative) In cases where a party with the author¡¯s property rights to both the original and derivative works transfers the author¡¯s property right to the derivative work, the standard of determining whether the expression of intent to transfer includes authorization to exploit the original work [2] In a case where: (a) Company A entered into a program development consignment agreement with Company B under which the latter would produce and supply a new inventory management program by modifying the existing program based on an Oracle database management operating system (OS) to run the program on a DB2-based database management OS; (b) in so doing, the two companies agreed that Company A would reserve all rights pertaining to the new program; (c) under the said agreement, Company B developed a new program using the existing program, which it supplied to Company A along with the corresponding Oracle-based source code, as well as the new program¡¯s source code; and (d) in supplying to Company C an inventory management system exploiting the new program, Company A manufactured and sold a separate program, the OS of which had been converted from DB2 to Oracle, the case holding that Company A¡¯s manufacture and sale of the program based on a converted OS is included in the right to adapt the new program transferred by Company B, and thus, does not constitute an infringement on Company B¡¯s property right as author to the existing program as the original work

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