Moral rights are most frequently applied to things like reports that people are contracted to write (so that the contracting agency can’t change the sense of the report in a press release, for example.

Moral rights cannot be sold/assigned, but can be waived. People hired to write reports are sometimes required to waive their moral rights as part of the contract to hire them. Which makes one absolutely an expert for hire….

I was unaware of the limited protection of moral rights in the US, but according to https://library.osu.edu/site/copyright/2017/07/21/moral-rights-in-the-united-states/ it only applies to visual works - not other forms of copyrighted work (such as articles, reports, or code).

../Dave
On Aug 27, 2019, 4:06 PM +0200, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org>, wrote:
| From: D. Joe via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

An excellent and informative post.

| Amongst those of us of a certain age in the US, who don't have legal
| training, I suspect the lore persists that copyright restrictions apply
| only if the copyright for the work has been registered--this used to be
| true in living memory.

Are you in the US?

My understanding of US law (shaky!!) is that damages are limited
if you didn't register the copyright.

The other thing that USAnian (and Canadian) people don't understand is
the "moral rights" component of copyright. The US copyright law got
this concept by way of Berne.

I had heard that US residents don't have moral rights under copyright law
in the US but foreigners do. I don't think that these have been
asserted often.

Even in Canada, moral rights are pretty rarely invoked. I only
remember one example: Michael Show vs Eaton Centre vis a vis ribons on
the Canada Geese sculptures. (Snow won).

I imagine that moral rights could be useful in the open source world.
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