IPA FE Subject A 2026 Question 20
A question IPA Japan published in 令和８年度 基本情報技術者試験 科目A 公開問題 問20, translated into English. ITPEC is based on the same exams.
Company A outsourced the visualization of its own business operations to Company B, and is considering outsourcing the development of a business system to Company C by presenting to Company C the business flow diagrams delivered as the deliverables. Which of the following is an appropriate restriction that arises when Company A uses these business flow diagrams?
Here, the contract concluded for the outsourcing to Company B contains a statement that all copyrights are transferred to Company A, and contains no particular statement concerning the author’s moral rights.
Explanation
Company A may not replace Company B's name as creator with its own — the copyright can be transferred, but the author's moral rights cannot.
Under Japan's Copyright Act, the economic rights in a work (reproduction, public transmission, adaptation and so on) can be transferred by contract, and here all of them went to Company A. The author's moral rights belong to the author alone and cannot be transferred. For a work its employees made on the job, Company B itself is the author, so it keeps them. One of them is the right of attribution: the right to decide whether, and under what name, the author is shown. Replacing Company B's name with Company A's on every page infringes that right, and the contract has no clause in which Company B promises not to exercise its moral rights.
Answer (b)
Why not others:
- •(a) — Company A holds the copyright, so it may copy the diagrams and give the electronic data to Company C; the NDA only adds confidentiality
- •(c) — printing copies for internal distribution is reproduction, a right Company A now holds
- •(d) — copying the data for backup to storage only Company A can access is also reproduction by the copyright holder
Key rule: Copyright (the economic rights) can be assigned, but the author's moral rights of publication, attribution and integrity stay with the author: the new owner may copy and use the work but not change who it says made it.
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This question comes from the past questions IPA Japan publishes, translated into English by ITPEC Practice. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with IPA or ITPEC. See the original paper (PDF) or Report an issue.