Section 1 of the Copyright Act states that copyright is the exclusive right of the “author” of a work of literature, science/scholarship, or art to publish it or duplicate it. The Act sets no requirements as regards how copyright arises. A work comes into being at the point when it is created.
One is therefore dealing with an “author” and a “work”. Both these terms are inseparably linked: without an author there is no work, and without a work no author. It should be noted that Section 1 does not deal with all the relevant rights but only with what are known as “exploitation rights”. “Personality rights” are not dealt with until Section 25 of the Act.