[Commons-l] Waiving Canadian moral rights?

[Padraic Ryan]

If you're like me, ever since the Flickr-virgin case and the release of the
3.0 CC licenses, you've been curious about the relationship between free
culture and "moral rights". After reading this post [
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/11/07/cc-oa-moral-rights/],
today, I learned something I didn't know before: Canada, apparently, may be
a unique jurisdiction in that it allows content creators to waive moral
rights.

I'm not sure if there has ever been an official Wikimedia (or broader free
culture) opinion on moral rights, but they seem antithetical to the cause -
it allows the original creator to dictate conditions on reusers. Creative
Commons seems to have washed their hands of this, but when it's possible, I
don't think we should. At some point, I think we will also have to deal with
the question of whether retaining moral rights (when not legally forced to)
can be considered creating non-free content.

Although this does seem to be a complex, unanswered, issue, I think we
should encourage Commons users creating Canadian works to waive these
rights. I've created a draft template at [[User:Padraic/Moralrights]],
please take a look. Ideally, this kind of waiver could be included in the
Canadian CC license templates as well.

There is also the international legal question, although I have a legal
newbie, it seems to me if moral rights are waived by the creator in the
country of a work's creation, then other countries would have no obligation
to continue to protect them.

Thoughts?
Padraic
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