Wasn’t it always the case that if you are hired to do a job the copyright belongs to the company that hired you?
Sort of. It has to be a written agreement, and technically it has to fall under several other criteria. Here’s a quote from the copyright office circular one (which is quoting the Copyright Act itself).
"Whether a work is made for hire is determined by the facts that exist at the time the work is
created. There are two situations in which a work may be made for hire:
1. When the work is created by an employee
as part of the employee’s regular duties, or
2. When an individual and the hiring party enter into an express written agreement that the work is to be considered a “work made for hire” and the work is
specially ordered or commissioned for use as: • A compilation
• A contribution to a collective work
• A part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
• A translation
• A supplementary work
• An instructional text
• A test
• Answer material for a test
• An atlas
The concept of work made for hire can be complicated and has serious consequences for both the individual who creates the work and the hiring party who is considered to be the author and copy- right owner of the work. For more information, see Works Made for Hire (Circular 30).”
I’ve been working with some attorney’s on a presentation about copyrights including this issue, and what strikes me is the only time a written agreement is valid to transfer copyrights seem to be circumstances limited to specific one time projects. The fact that only two situations are listed, and those situations are very specific means that all other situations fall outside of “work for hire”.
I’m not 100% sure of their model, but if they are connecting you with a client to perform a work as mentioned above, the end client, not Kodak should end up with the copyrights. If on the other hand they are “making up” projects so Kodak is the actual client, and then they choose to use those as stock photographs, this may actually fall outside of the work for hire statutes as listed in the Copyright Act since I don’t believe creating a stock library of a huge number of photographs to sell individually can be considered a collective
work (which is defined in other sections of the copyright law). That being said, if you agreed to them, seems like a moot point, more like a technicality that probably wouldn’t hold up in court.
And of course the business is located in Singapore, which did finally agree and become a participant of the 1986 Berne Convention in 1998, I know there are some slight variations allowed in each of the signatory countries in how they apply the requirements of the convention in their own laws.
And while it might not be technically kosher with the copyright act, certainly anyone doing it goes in with full knowledge of the fact, so they really can’t cry foul later.
But then again, I’m not lawyer, just a guy who studied this issue a ton for a class I teach to photographers. And with copyright law, just when you think you are right, you’ll probably find out you are wrong. I’ve read dozens of court cases that completely contradict each other in their final judgements.
