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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Moral rights in Creative Commons licenses

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Moral rights in Creative Commons licenses
  • Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:55:43 +0200

Rob Myers skrev:
Javier Candeira wrote:

Mentioning moral rights and pseudo-waiving them where applicable serves
Creative Commons better.

I believe that moral rights are un-waivable in some countries (Germany?) so this approach would not work internationally.


Moral rights being un-waivable is probably the most common case. Btw Lessig has written an article about the isssue of CC and moral rights, see: http://lessig.org/blog/2005/02/on_the_challenge_of_moral_righ.html.

Lessig writes: "Moral rights -- which are not "European" but in fact common to the US/UK tradition and the European tradition (in our tradition, they are called "author's rights," and the great text on this is Lyman Ray Patterson's Copyright in Historical Perspective) -- don't admit of such easy manipulation. In many jurisdictions that protect moral rights, you can't just automatically give away the moral right, without knowing something about how, or in what context, the work is to be used. For those jurisdictions then, a Creative Commons-like mechanism just wouldn't work. Such a mechanism couldn't succeed, in other words, in effecting an agreement about such moral rights. Creative Commons is a hammer. This is glass blowing.

So our response to these jurisdictions is simple: we don't purport to affect the moral rights at all. They are left as they would be, because our tool can't effectively do anything about them. Thus, it is not because we don't "understand" moral rights that we don't do anything about them. It is instead because we precisely understand that our tool, given the law, can't do anything about them."


IMHO I don't see moral rights as a problem. In the author's right tradition copyright legislation has a strong social dimension. Authors are seen as a generally weak and powerless entity that need protection against vicarious publishers and other such buyers of copyrights and this is reflected in our laws. The freedom of contract is often partly restricted and there are also often rules that creates a strong presumption against complete transfers of rights and otherwise gives the author an advantage when disputes arises about how a copyright contract is to be understood. This social dimension is an important part of the system and it's not worth throwing away.

/Peter Brink









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