The legal effects of employment agreement in the field of copyright law

There are specific provisions in various areas of intellectual property law, including but not limited to patent law, copyright law and design law, that regulate the effects of the relationship between the employee and the employer on the ownership of intellectual works. This study deals with the copyright law aspect of the issue. In our country Turkish Copyright Law (FSEK) Art.18/2 is the paragraph that regulates the issue of who has the right and authority over a work created by an employee. As a regulation composed of a single sentence, it inevitably creates many questions that require answers. The problem of who has the rightful ownership of works created by employees has necessitated the formation of regulations not only in Turkey but in other countries around the world, from the United States (the US) to China, from France to Australia. Regulations in the US and Germany are especially significant. It is believed that these two countries represent the two polar opposite approaches to the issue. While in the US it is the employer who has the ownership of the work, in Germany it is the employee that is the owner of all the rights and entitlements of the work. Furthermore, due to their similarities with regulations in our country, these two countries are useful for investigation. There are phrases in regulations of both countries that overlap with those in FSEK Art.18/2. The existing body of academic research and court decisions in these countries prove both insightful and fruitful to assess how these regulations should be best interpreted and applied. Regulations dealing with inventions and designs of employees are also consulted in order to raise relevant questions and look for answers. Provisions and interpretations related to inventions by employees, which deal with the issue in the deepest sense, have been especially enlightening. This study is composed of four sections. The first section focuses on the reasons that have necessitated regulations within intellectual property law dealing with the use of rights that an employee has on her/his work. Then, based on these reasons, various examples of systems from around the world are examined alongside the system preferred in Turkish law. Lastly, this section considers the relationship between regulations in this area and those that belong to the other areas of intellectual property law. The second section investigates the questions of to what kinds of contracts and to whom FSEK Art.18/2 is applied. In this regard, the concept of "employment agreement" is explained and the commonalities and differences between this type of agreement and other service contracts are examined. The second part of the section deals with the definitions of the concepts of "employee" and "employer" and the aspects of these concepts according to both private law and public law. This section also questions the location of artificial intelligence within this context. The third section discusses the set of conditions determined by FSEK Art.18/2 that are required for the employer to acquire the authority to use the rights. These conditions include the following: the work must be created during the employment of the employee; the quality of the work dealt with in the contract must not require the application of the opposite of the regulation that gives the employer the right to use the work; and in the contract it should not have been agreed that the opposite of the law should be applied. The fourth and final section examines the effects of FSEK Art.18/2 on rights resulting from ownership of a work. In this framework, the meaning, scope and limits of the authority of the employer to use the rights. Another issue discussed in this section is the question of whether or not the employee should be paid compensation beyond the salary. Keywords: Copyright Law, Article 18/2, Work, Author, Employee, Employer, Employment, Economic Rights, Moral Rights.