Copyrights in Cyprus

What are copyrights and how they are protected in Cyprus?

What is Copyright?

Copyrights are Intellectual Property rights, which include artistic work, music, sound recordings, motion pictures, movies, photographs, literal work, scientific work, and other categories which are expressions and not ideas. A requirement for the protection of the work is that the work must be original and to emanate from the author. These rights include the right to reproduce, to sell, to rent the work, to create derivative work, to share copies of the work, and to perform the work in public.

Protection & Copyright Law in Cyprus

In Cyprus, Copyrights are governed by the Intellectual Property Rights Law No. 59/76 as amended, the Berne Convention, Geneva Convention, Paris Convention, TRIPS, and WIPO.

Owners of Copyrights

The owners of Copyrights have the exclusive right to the use of their work; however, if they wish, they can choose to transfer them to people, individually or collectively, and they can also make them available to the public.

The creator’s work is protected against theft, the creator receives the economic benefits for his creativity, and the public enjoys the work which if it were not for the creator, it might not have been created or expressed. It should be noted that the owners have no obligation to publish or make their work available to the public.

How Long is it Protected?

Copyrights arise automatically the minute the work is created. The creator neither is required to register his work nor is required to place the internationally known symbol of Copyright notice © on the work to protect it. They are protected for the duration of the author’s life, plus seventy more years from the end of the year which the author dies. If two or more people jointly create the work, the work lasts from the minute it is created, plus seventy more years from the end of the year of the death of the last surviving creator (e.g., in movies this means the last survivor of the producers, primary director, script and screenplay writer, and the composer of the music).

Requirements for a Copyrighted Work

The work must be original, creative, and fixed.

• Originality

  For the work to satisfy the requirement of originality, it must obviously be originated from the creator, and it must be an independent creation. There is no requirement for it to be unique, novel, or inventive, as in Patents. The work must not be copied from other original work, as in such event the work is not only unentitled for protection, but the ‘creator’ is in copyright infringement.

• Creativity

  To satisfy creativity, work requires a minimum amount of creativity. For example, a sound lasts 2 minutes, but only a few seconds of its whole duration is creative, the work satisfies this requirement.

• Fixation

  The work must be fixed in tangible means of expression, so as it can be stable and permanent. For example, a song is fixed when it is recorded. The minute the work is fixed, protection arises automatically.

Evidence and rights management in Cyprus

Cyprus has no copyright register that an owner must use to obtain or exercise copyright. Owners should retain dated drafts, source files, contributor records, assignments, licences and publication evidence. The © symbol may be used with the owner's name and the date. Registration with a collective management organisation is optional and concerns representation and licensing; it is not copyright registration.

Cyprus law provides specific statutory exceptions and limitations. They should not be described as a broad US-style “fair use” rule. Whether criticism, review, reporting, teaching or research is permitted depends on the applicable statutory condition, attribution and extent of use.

What we provide

We advise on authorship and ownership evidence, licences and assignments, infringement and enforcement strategy, collective management, IP litigation and international commercial arbitration.