[Commons-l] Waiving Canadian moral rights?

Hi, I'm one of the Project Leads for Creative Commons Canada, and since this thread came to my attention I thought I would try to add some context. Padraic Ryan wrote: I would agree with geni that other common law jurisdictions are likely similar in that they allow moral rights to be waived to some degree. The situation is not as simple as this suggests, of course. While the Canadian Copyright Act says that moral rights "may be waived in whole or in part", there is disagreement as to whether they can be waived *in general*, or if waivers can only apply for particular uses of a work. For moral rights waivesrs to benefit the open community, they would need to be general waivers for all uses of the work. I should note that there are two categories of moral rights: the right to attribution, and the right to integrity. Since open licences like CC require attribution anyhow, that moral right is not an issue. When we talk about the possibility of waiving moral rights, we're only talking about the right of integrity -- I take it this is what Padraic meant. So here's the deal. In past years, when CC had no policy w.r.t. moral rights, each jurisdiction that had to deal with moral rights did their own thing. In Canada, the version 1.0 licence retained moral rights because we were trying to stay as close to the US CC licence as possible. In versions 2.0 and 2.5 of the Canadian CC licences, we waived the moral right of integrity. This choice was taken for just the reason Padraic is interested in here: some in the community feel that waiving moral rights is required in order for the licences to be libre. For the 3.0 Canada licences, we are following the CC policy for moral rights that resulted from extensive discussion. Given this policy and the issues around whether moral rights can be waived in general, the CC Canada 3.0 licences will keep the moral right of integrity intact. I would note that the Canadian 2.5 licences will still be out there once the 3.0 version is released, and Canadians who want to take their chances with waiving moral rights can still use the old versions. Cheers, Andy -- Andy Kaplan-Myrth, LL.B., M.A. Barrister & Solicitor Joint Project Lead, Creative Commons Canada ------------------------------------------------ email: andy(a)creativecommons.ca web: http://www.creativecommons.ca ------------------------------------------------ email: andy(a)kaplan-myrth.ca web: http://kaplan-myrth.ca ------------------------------------------------ PGP Key ID 0xE9349025 ------------------------------------------------