[Foundation-l] Does "free content" exist in France?

[Delirium]

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