[Foundation-l] Fair Use and Registered Trademarks

[Rowan Collins]

On 14/07/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:
> > confirmed in this case), the original author of a public-domain
> > work has *no* rights of any sort, not even the right to be
> > credited, since by definition public-domain works are not owned in
> > any fashion by anyone.
> 
> Are you sure ?
> 
> It can mean that the author has no right to be credited, but does it
> mean that someone else can claim to be the author ?

[[en:Moral rights]] states: "...[the US] still does not completely
recognize moral rights as part of copyright law, but rather as part of
other bodies of law, such as defamation or unfair competition." In
other words, the inalienable right to attribution does not exist in
any form (except for a limited coverage for visual works).

Meanwhile, a quick bit of research shows that, while "moral rights"
are now partially enshrined in UK law, they expire along with the
copyright on the work in question. [Since these are fairly recent
rights and also require explicit assertion, no qualifying work is yet
old enough for them to have existed and then expired, but
theoretically they will.]

As far as I can see, it is perfectly logical from this that there is
no legal protection in either of these jurisdictions against a work
whose copyright has expired being passed off as the work of someone
else. That may seem surprising, but I think it is true.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]