Ray Saintonge wrote:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
In many countries, the moral rights can't be waived or renounced (in Mexico you can't). But those are not the rights that licenses deal with, but "patrimonial" (not sure about the proper translation) rights.
No matter how free is the image, the author will always remain the author. That's nothing to do with freeness.
The right of attribution? When through time a person's copyright has expired you are free to reproduce the material, but you cannot tell the public that you are the author; the original author still needs to be credited.
In the U.S. at least this isn't true; an author of a work no longer under copyright retains no residual rights of any sort except those that would normally be granted by libel and similar laws, not even a right to be credited as the author; this was settled in 2003 in [[en:Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.]].
What is somewhat unclear to me is to what extent other countries' moral-rights legislation is enforceable outside their countries. Can it be safely ignored by those in countries that lack such laws, much like Turkey's laws against "insulting Turkishness" are ignored outside Turkey, or is it worldwide in legal applicability? If the former it presents less of a unique problem for free content---it's already the case that free content's reuse is restricted in some ways in some countries due to particular legislation, and we can't do a whole lot about that.
-Mark