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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: cc-uk <cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-uk] Lessig audio now up
  • Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 23:16:54 +0100

Lessig on moral rights, an impromptu answer as part of the Q&A. My transcription, with "um"s, "right"s and "y'know"s stripped. E&OE. ;-)

"So moral rights are an extremely difficult complicating factor in this. In some countries you technically can't give away your moral rights. so that means we can't really offer the option of saying you can make a derivative work of my work without my permission up front. Some countries there are ways around that. Japan has this very complicated way to get around it, so if you look at the Japanese license it's a really huge license because they've gotta go through every possible use and articulate 'yes, I'm waiving my moral rights with respect to this possible use'. I thing we've got a real question about what the importance or value of moral rights is going forward. To the extent moral rights really do protect authors' control over their creativity I'm all for them. To the extent moral rights just make it harder for culture to be made available broadly I'm not for them. And I think what we need to do is to evaluate what actually moral rights are doing in this context, whether they're helping or not. Because there're many contexts in which it's just forcing stuff to be blocked from being made available broadly and I can see no public justification for that at all.
Now you know one thing about this is the distance between Europe and the United States. You used to be part of our tradition, which was we only give out monopolies because we believe they're going to help the public, that we give out the copyright monopoly because we believe it's going to help the public. You guys were the first free culture lawyers when you destroyed the power of the conger by passing limits on copyright terms in 1710, which were finally recognised by the house of lords in 1774. In 1774, for the first time, Shakespeare entered the public domain. You did that because you saw the conger of publishers in London was a choke on the ability for British culture to spread broadly. - Or English culture to spread broadly, you were fighting the Scottish at that time you were trying to steal your culture. But you set the ideal which the Americans copied. Then you guys drifted off toward Europe and became much closer and this kind of moral rights conception than we are. We preserve the tradition which is we give out government monopolies when it helps society as a whole, that's our ideal, now that ideal has been captured by the modern-day conger, Disney and the recording companies, so we need help once again, you guys could be an inspiration here. But moral rights is a sort of cross between these two traditions. "

- Rob.





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