Joint authorship, disjointed doctrine: collaborative creativity in comparative perspective

Although the subject of much academic literature, collaborative authorship remains undertheorized in copyright law. Yet, it is precisely in cases of purported joint authorship that the core concept of authorship as creative autonomy is most clearly defined. In such cases, the individual author is almost always categorized in contradistinction to an Other—a mere performer, director, editor, contributor, or assistant—who is claiming to be a joint author, often in the context of uneven relational power dynamics. Recognizing the growing importance of defining authorship as we enter the age of AI, this article maps and compares joint authorship doctrine across four common law jurisdictions—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia—all of which share origins in a single case, Levy v. Rutley (1871). Nonetheless, their approaches to establishing and managing joint authorship now diverge in highly significant but underappreciated ways. We map out the comparative points of divergence between the jurisdictions along four axes: authorial contribution, degree of integration, nature of collaboration, and ownership implications. Connecting the dots, we suggest that different co-ownership rules may drive the development of threshold tests. We conclude by imagining a model for collaborative creativity and its consequences that combines the UK’s threshold test and proportionate ownership with the US approach to co-ownership. This would better incentivize and recognize the relational act of creative collaboration while minimizing obstacles to the dissemination and use of jointly authored works, thereby advancing the public’s interest.