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[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

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.