ClayShirky complains at BoingBoing:
I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN’T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders – they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity. ¹
Via JoiIto ².
Reminds me of LawrenceLessig’s book CodeAndOtherLawsOfCyberspace: The software we use increasingly dictates what we can and cannot do, irrespective of what the laws we chose for ourselves allow or forbid. *Code is Law.*
#Copyright
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Moral rights are often used by “editors” to enforce their rights and not the rights of the author himself. Moral rights are not really useful for us... in free software and free information, we are using only the patrimonial rights and this is working quite well. I don’t subscribe to the idea of enforcing moral rights, this is opening the pandora’s box....
– adulau 2005-04-04 12:14 UTC
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This has nothing to do with the post you are commenting, right?
Are you commenting on my posts on the cc-licenses list?
– Alex Schroeder 2005-04-04 12:30 UTC
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Sorry for the confusion... It was regarding the post on the cc-licenses list. I just saw the title “Copyright” in your diary 😉 I really open to discuss the question of moral rights.
– adulau 2005-04-05 12:54 UTC
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I have two questions, then:
1. If the law says that you may not do away with moral rights, should the national CC licenses add a specific clause doing away with moral rights anyway, knowing full well that those will not hold in court?
2. Do we want the license to specify that you lose the rights granted to you (from upstream) should you ever exercise your moral rights? I assume that your own contributions shall remain unaffected for downstream authors, so the exact “punishment” would have to be carefully discussed.
As I said on the list, I don’t want to discuss whether I am for or against moral rights. They are a given here in Switzerland, and I don’t think Switzerland is going to change copyright law to accomodate free software in the next years.
I think the answers to the above questions is “no.”
(As you may have read on these pages, I also unsubscribed from cc-licenses.)
– Alex Schroeder 2005-04-05 14:12 UTC
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Yep. I’m following you. For me, patrimonial rights and moral rights are clearly separated (e.g. in the copyright/author rights in Belgium). We are using the exclusive patrimonial rights for free software (GNU GPL) and free information (GNU FDL). Moral rights are out of scope and are not related to the free license. We shouldn’t add specific clause about moral rights as that is generating legal instability and providing new possible weak point in licensing. For my perspective, the national CC approach is dangerous and creating new “ghetto” for free information (I don’t like to use “free content”). The universality of the GNU GPL is very nice and permits to share without national boundaries. Sometimes ago, I have made some comments regarding the belgian transposition of the CCs and I didn’t get any clear feedback on the “moral rights” and some other compatibility issues. http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-be/2004-November/000031.html
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-be/2004-November/000031.html
Thanks a lot for the discussion,
– adulau 2005-04-06 21:50 UTC