> While I believe that's true in much (all?) of Europe, this
> is an area where US and European laws say different things
> about Intellectual Property. In the US it's quite clear
> that morality and law are unrelated ... ;-)
Nope. The U.S. has now joined the Berne convention, which means
it has adopted the moral-rights-for-visual-artists clauses of it
through the Visual Artists Protection Act of 1990.
> Speaking of which, I've always wondered exactly what those
> European "moral rights" of authors (etc) are. Could someone
> give me a URL for a good summary?
The two basic moral rights are the paternity right (the right
to be known as the creator of a work, and to <em>not</em> be identified
as the creator of a distorted or mutilated version of the
work) and the integrity right (the right to prevent the work from being
destroyed, unless it is affixed to a building, in which case it
can be destroyed when the building is).
Obviously the second right is more appropriate for "thing" rather than
"pattern" works, e.g. paintings and sculptures, not books or
movies or phonorecords or software.
It turns out that the Berne convention on paper
grants both types of rights to all creators, but allows any country
to opt out of moral-rights clauses for authors: the U.S. has done so
de facto by never enacting enabling legislation. In the U.K. such
rights are very weak, de facto nonexistent. Considering the
importance of these markets, international protection for
the moral rights of authors is lacking.
BTW, in this context the opposite of "moral right" is
"economic right": both kinds are legal rights under the Berne
convention.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)