2008/10/21 Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org:
Thomas Dalton writes:
While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral rights?
More or less.
The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.
Wow, thanks.
Worse than that. Technically most EU countries should have identical moral rights clauses. Implementation of the clauses is inconsistent and in many cases there is a lack of caselaw (although the lawsuit over changing a bridge design failed).
For the average wikipedian on the ground the issue is less one of what you can handle or find people to handle (I generally assume that the foundation can deal with pretty much any copyright issues should it have to) but how much attention we should be paying to moral rights at all. At the moment we mostly ignore them (along with most non copyright related IP stuff) but we don't know if this is a long term viable approach.