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