IntroductionRecent developments in law have been described as a commodification of information. These trends have raised worries among those who are concerned with the historical development of intellectual rights, those concerned with comparative intellectual and legal practices, and those concerned with future trends in the development of intellectual property (e.g., Bollier, 2002; Lessig, 2002; Vaidhyanathan, 2001). These concerns are often expressed in terms of ethics or jurisprudence, cultural sociology, or the impact of intellectual property regimes on the development of new ideas in a social milieu.The online and digital environments have brought to intellectual property issues greater focus and attention. These two interrelated technologies support a range of practices that may or may not be legal and/or ethical. Certainly the entrepreneurial and economic environments in which information is created, transmitted, consumed, transformed, retransmitted, and recon- sumed has undergone changes since the advent of online information access and particularly since the advent of the World Wide Web in 199i.Moral Versus Legal RightsIn this paper we are concerned with an essentially European concept, that of the Rights of the Author. These are contrasted with his or her legal rights. The Moral Rights of the are associated with but separate from copyright. The legal concept copyright is defined in international law by the Berne Convention on Copyright, and has its most recent incarnation in UK law as the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988 and in US law as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. The Rights of the Author originate in French civil law's distinction between the author's inalienable over his work (droits d'auteur) and his separate, saleable economic rights. Although the economic correlate well with the AngloAmerican common-law systems' concept of copyright, the are quite different.Where is often justified as a fit reward for the authors' labors and an incentive to further creation, the are intended to protect the natural bond between an author and his artistic creation, a bond analogous to that between parent and child. In this vision the protection of the author's quasi-sacred connection to his work is of paramount importance: no public interest in free use of the work, or publishers' interest in its economic exploitation can challenge it. Great works enrich the soul of humankind, but even a minor work is still the author's spiritual child, and thus worthy of respect.The Right of the AuthorThe term moral rights or droits moraux is used here as a legal term of art; it refers to legally recognized of the author, but that are seen as being grounded in necessity, i.e., they are natural or as well as legal rights. in were originally produced by the French law courts of the latter nineteenth century. In 1920, they were incorporated into the Rome Convention. They now appear in an expanded form in Article 6bis of the Berne Convention (Paris Act, 197i), to which both the United States and United Kingdom are signatories. The United Kingdom's Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988 has expressly implemented the provisions of Article 6bis (i) of the Berne Convention on copyright, in Chapter IV, Rights, §§ 77-89, §§ 4-95, § 103 and transitional provisions in Schedule i paragraphs 22-24, albeit perhaps somewhat halfheartedly. Article 6bis provides,Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work, and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation [Article 6bis (i) Berne Convention 1886, last amended 197i]. …
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Aug 26, 2022
Ludhy Cahyana 
Open Access
