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

[Birgitte SB]

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> 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.
> 

Moral rights are not some oddball local law, but
well-recognized area of international copyright law
acknowledged in the Berne convention.  This is not at
all like "insulting Turkishness" were it is best to
just claim a different jusristiction and pretend it
doesn't exist.  Not if you want to maintain any
integrity as an international movement anyways.

Birgitte SB



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