Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The only reason that "moral rights" is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger.
I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references.
I couldn't find the reference that I recalled from a couple of years ago, but I did find some reference to the idea at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Documents/CopyrightandAuthors-70.pdf in the section "Some philosophy".
There are profound differences at a very deep level between the rights of authors in civil law countries and the right to copy in common law countries. In common law countries copyright has been primarily an economic right instead of a personal right. It used to be that copyright disputes were framed between two publishers or between publisher and author. To the extent that the law was a balance between interests it was the interests of publishers and authors that were being balanced. That the using public could have interests was unthinkable because these users flew below the radar of cost effectiveness. If it was not economical for a person to infringe copyrights in the first place, how could it be worthwhile to lobby politicians to have these rights for the general using public. Today we have a third party whose interests were never considered in the balance.
Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft.
I don't know anything about the history of Finnish jurisprudence, but that statement seems to draw on the French model. Canada has provisions for moral rights, but the person claiming that his reputation has been damaged would have the burden of proving that as well as proving the amount of damages. If one made a claim for $1,000,000 in damages he shouldn't expect that it will be granted just because he says so.
I have great difficulty understanding how the "right to examine" could be traced to some grandiose "Rights of Man" basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days.
I seem to be misunderstanding something about your stated "right to examine". Is someone claiming that authors are prevented from examining their own works?
Ec