[pp.int.general] copyright vs. "droit dáuteur"

[John Nilsson]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:53 PM, Reinier Bakels <r.bakels at planet.nl> wrote:

> Interesting! You say effectively the same as the professor I heard in a
> seminar on the relationship "intellectual property" (sorry, they used the
> term) and human rights: "NO LAWS ARE MADE IN HEAVEN"! Still there is a
> perception that authors' right in the legal system only protects rights that
> "natually" existed before the legislatior got involved. I admit, this is
> somehow weird, but there still are supporters of this view (entirely or
> partially). Allegedly it is one of the reasons why the Berne convention does
> not allow any requirement of formalities. The Americans only accepted this
> rule in the late 1980s, and in the US it is stil advantageous to add the (c)
> (circle-c) for extra legal certainty.


I think there is a case to be made for "natural" laws. The basic argument
being that legislation and law is not the same thing. While legislation is
created and designed, "law" can be seen as the cultural phenomenon of agreed
boundaries of behavior.

The English system of common law is in this way a codification of such
emerged behavioral norms rather than the designed law of legislation.

This is a podcast which IIRC discuss this line of argument.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2006/12/boudreaux_on_la.html

also take a look at Murray N. Rothbards writings on the subject of natural
rights. I believe it is in "The Ethics of Liberty" he makes a thorough
exploration of the subject. (Not that I agree with Rothbard in everything,
his logic can be a bit faulty at times)


> The term of moral rights is not necessarily the same as the term of the
> exploitation rights. In France, moral rights last forever. In NL, the moral
> rights of an author only continue after his death if he decided so in his
> will (I saw a warning the other day that authors often forget to mention
> this in their will).
>
> Finally, the right to prohibit publication, is it a moral right or a
> commercial right? Whatever the answer is, the collective rights management
> schemes typically ignore this aspect. They assume by default that the author
> is only interested in money. What a dreadful mistake! These dreadful bodies
> don't foster the authors' right, they ignore tehem (to some extent).


Regarding the "moral rights" in these laws. Couldn't most of the interesting
cases be handled by other laws allready focused on more general issues?

Controlled first publication
Ordinary property law gives you both the right to control any media you've
encoded the original work into. Taking that media against your will is pure
and simple theft. Then there is the possiblity to sign NDAs to prohibit
anyone takeing part of the work to disclose it to a third pary lawfully.

The right to be attributed and/or not miss attributed. Could this not simply
be handled by laws against fraud and/or slander?

BR,
John
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