[sc-announce] CC, Open Access, and moral rights - Science Commons blog

Kaitlin Thaney kaitlin at creativecommons.org
Wed Nov 7 12:30:16 EST 2007


http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/11/07/cc-oa-moral-rights/


    CC, Open Access, and moral rights

November 7th, 2007 
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/11/07/cc-oa-moral-rights/> 
by Thinh Nguyen

"A question that we often see in connection with the use of Creative 
Commons licenses in OA publishing is how the Creative Commons licenses, 
(and in particular CC-BY) affect moral rights. One example is this 
<http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/2007/11/oa-and-derivative-works-continued.html> 
post on the topic by Peter Suber.

 From the perspective of moral rights, the Creative Commons licenses 
start with a simple proposition: They don't affect moral rights. The 
Creative Commons FAQ says that, "All Creative Commons licenses (with the 
exception of Canada) leave moral rights unaffected."

Although we are frequently used to talking about concepts such as "moral 
rights" as if they are the same everywhere, most lawyers are well aware 
that all laws are local, meaning that they have jurisdictional limits 
and variations. For example, although the United States is obligated to 
protect moral rights under the Berne Convention, the United States does 
it very differently than countries in Europe, and it does not protect 
the same range of rights. The United States uses a combination of 
legislation (such as the Visual Artists Rights Act) and common law 
protections (libel and defamation) to protect an artist's personality 
rights. The United States has deemed this sufficient to comply with its 
Berne Convention obligations. And even individual countries in Europe 
are different in terms of what rights are protected under the rubric of 
"moral rights" and how those rights are protected procedurally. [...]

[...] So one question comes up a lot: how is it consistent to have a 
license (such as CC-BY) that allows derivative works to be made while at 
the same time recognizing that the author reserves his moral rights? 
Isn't any derivative work an infringement of moral rights, when they 
exist? [...]"

-- 
Click the link above to read this post in its entirety.

- K
................
Kaitlin Thaney
Project Manager
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
................

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