Category Archives: Integrity

U.S. Copyright Office Releases Report on Moral Rights

Posted April 29, 2019
Painting of author at desk in blue robe
“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

In March 2017, Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the U.S. Copyright Office’s study of moral rights. We voiced our support for creators’ rights to integrity and attribution (subject to limitations and exceptions that protect downstream creative reuse), and our belief that these non-economic authorial rights should be formally recognized in U.S. copyright law—as they are in many other countries. We also encouraged the Copyright Office to consider recognizing other non-economic author rights, namely, the right to revive one’s work if it is no longer available commercially and the right to revise one’s work over time.

Last week, the Copyright Office released a report, Authors, Attribution, and Integrity: Examining Moral Rights in the United States, which provides a review of the U.S. moral rights landscape and recommendations for enhancing existing moral rights protections. The Copyright Office identifies three principles that guide its analysis of a U.S. moral rights framework: respecting foundational principles of U.S. law (including the First Amendment, fair use, and limited copyright terms), appreciating the importance creators place on their attribution and integrity interests, and recognizing and respecting the diversity among industry sectors and different types of works.

Based on these principles, the Office concludes there is no need for the creation of a blanket moral rights statute at this time. Instead, the Office recommends that Congress should consider legislation targeted at specific areas, including amending the Lanham Act and the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) to better protect attribution and integrity interests, expanding recourse for removal or alteration of copyright management information, and adopting a federal right of publicity law. These recommendations are detailed in the Office’s report.

Although we are disappointed that the Office declined to recommend that Congress consider new statutory moral rights legislation at this time, Authors Alliance commends the Office for recognizing that attribution and integrity provide meaningful incentives to authors to create new works and that the value to authors of reputational enhancement by virtue of public dissemination of their works is meaningful to authors.

Authors Alliance will continue to speak out for the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of their works. As we wrote in our founding Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, attribution serves not only the interests of authors, but also the reading public’s interest in knowing whose works they are consuming and society’s interest in an accurate record of the intellectual heritage of humankind.

Authors’ Rights Beyond Attribution and Integrity:
The Rights to Revive and Revise

Posted April 6, 2017

 

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

The following article, by Authors Alliance co-founder Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, continues our series of posts on the topic of moral rights. Molly is Professor of Law and Associate Dean at UC Berkeley, and a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. She also serves as Board Chair of Creative Commons.

The Copyright Office is considering whether U.S. Copyright law ought to recognize authorial attribution and integrity rights. Authors Alliance submitted comments in support of these rights—if they are carefully crafted and limited—but also proposes two other authorial rights: one to revive one’s work and the other to revise one’s work if the copyright is owned by another.

Here’s why:

Consider the plight of an author who has assigned her copyright to a publisher who is no longer printing the book or making it available online. Perhaps the publisher has lost interest because sales are low; but the author still maintains a strong interest in having her work available to readers. Authors Alliance member Paul Heald’s research suggests just how prevalent this problem is.

The only tool that U.S. copyright law currently provides to authors of works that are effectively locked up in a publishers’ vault is a right to terminate a copyright transfer 35 years later. In theory, authors could use the termination of transfer provision to revive works that have fallen out of print. In practice, the daunting intricacies of the scheme make it difficult for many authors to take advantage of their rights. These challenges are not insurmountable. Authors Alliance and Creative Commons are making efforts to help authors exercise their rights. But even if it works as smoothly as possible, the termination of transfer provision is an awkward solution for authors who want to revive their works. Most glaringly, termination does not take effect for decades after a work was created. In most cases this will be long after a book has gone out of print.

Now consider an author who has changed her mind, on the basis of new research, about an argument she made in a book to which a publisher owns the copyright. She wants to disseminate a revised edition but the publisher denies her permission to create a derivative work based upon the original. An author who is not the owner of copyright in her own work cannot insist, under U.S. law, on her right to revise that work beyond what is permitted by fair use. And, again, the termination right might not be a timely or practical solution.

The prospect of these dilemmas is one motivation for authors who are increasingly retaining and managing their own copyrights. Unfortunately, that movement comes too late for authors who have already assigned their copyrights to publishers. For some such authors, it may be possible to exercise a contractual right of reversion or renegotiate as described in the Authors Alliance Guide to Understanding Rights Reversion. But not every contract includes a reversion clause and not every publisher is willing to renegotiate—even assuming that the publisher is still the copyright owner and can be easily identified and located that purpose (not a safe assumption in light of the well-documented problem of orphan works).

Perhaps what these authors need—in addition to rights of attribution and integrity—are statutory rights to revive and revise their works. Although such rights are not separately identified as part of the authors’ rights tradition, there are some features of copyright laws of other nations that at least nod toward their importance. In a recent article in the Houston Law Review, I explain how the U.S. could borrow from and improve upon these approaches to prevent the dilemmas faced by authors for whom copyright stands as an obstacle to reaching readers with both their existing works and their new ideas.

For more in our series on moral rights, read on!

Pam Samuelson on “A Case for Recognizing Attribution and Integrity as Moral Rights”

Authors Alliance on “The Need for a Nuanced Approach to Attribution and Integrity Rights”

Our comments in response to the Copyright Office study on moral rights

Authors Alliance Submits Comments on Moral Rights to the U.S. Copyright Office

Posted March 30, 2017

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

Today, Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the U.S. Copyright Office’s study of moral rights. We support creators’ rights to integrity and attribution (subject to some limitations and exceptions that protect downstream creative reuse), and we believe that these non-economic authorial rights should be formally recognized in U.S. copyright law—as they are in many other countries. We also encourage the Copyright Office to consider recognizing other non-economic author rights, namely, the right to revive one’s work if it is no longer available commercially and the right to revise one’s work over time.

Hover over the document below to view in your browser, or download here. We will continue our series of posts on moral rights in the coming weeks and will keep our readers up to date on developments at the Copyright Office.

AuthorsAlliance_MoralRightsComment

A Nuanced Approach to Attribution and Integrity Rights

Posted March 28, 2017

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

Since our launch, Authors Alliance has endorsed the idea that Congress should extend statutory protections for attribution (the right of an author to be credited as the author of his or her work) and integrity (the right of an author to prevent prejudicial distortions of the work) as part of its copyright reform initiatives. In our Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, we wrote that the “law should recognize the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of our works.”

Last week, Authors Alliance President Pamela Samuelson identified eight reasons why it is in the interest of authors as well as the public for authorial attribution and integrity to be statutorily recognized in U.S. copyright law. In this second post in our series on moral rights, we set out some additional contours for the scope of these rights.

Limitations and Exceptions

To prevent attribution and integrity rights from stifling onward creativity and speech, these rights should be carefully cabined through limitations and exceptions. Three of these limitations and exceptions are fair use, first sale, and “reasonableness.”

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A Case For Recognizing Attribution and Integrity as Authorial Rights

Posted March 22, 2017

The following is a guest post by Authors Alliance President Pamela Samuelson. We welcome your comments as we continue to explore the topic of moral rights over the coming weeks.

In preparing Authors Alliance’s forthcoming comments in response to the Copyright Office’s Notice of Inquiry for its Study on the Moral Rights of Attribution and Integrity, I thought of eight reasons why it is in the interest of authors as well as the public for authorial attribution and integrity to be statutorily recognized in U.S. copyright law, as they are in the laws of virtually every other nation on earth.

First and foremost, many authors care deeply about having their names associated with the works they create and about their works being available to the public in the form in which their creators authorized dissemination. These authors experience lack of attribution and mutilation of their works as significantly injurious to their well-being.

Second, statutory recognition of attribution and integrity interests would send an important signal to the public about the respect that members of Congress have for the myriad contributions that authors make to the ongoing “progress of Science,” consonant with the constitutional clause under which Congress enacts copyright laws.

Third, recognition of authorship attribution and work integrity is in the public interest insofar as members of the public care about the authenticity of creative works with which they interact. Readers, viewers, and listeners want reassurance that the works to which they have access were created by specific individuals and have been vetted by the authors as the works authorized for public dissemination. For example, someone who has read several William Gibson novels and just purchased another will want to see Gibson’s name on the cover and be assured that the book just purchased is in the form the author wanted to reach his readers.

Fourth, being attributed as a work’s author and being able to control the integrity of one’s work is important to building and maintaining authorial reputations. Although it is often difficult to quantify the value to authors of reputation enhancement by virtue of public dissemination of their works, the value is real and meaningful to authors. It is indeed akin to the goodwill that firms build up over time associated with trademarks as the public comes to trust products or services bearing the protected mark.

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Moving Toward a “Moral Right” of Attribution in U.S. Copyright Law

Posted May 4, 2016

Authors Alliance Executive Director Michael Wolfe

When Authors Alliance launched two years ago with its Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, one of the reforms we endorsed was support for a formal “moral right” of attribution. In that document, we said:

The law should recognize the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of our works. This is especially important for those of us who create in order to contribute to knowledge and culture. Attribution serves not only our interests as authors, but also the reading public’s interest in knowing whose works they are consuming and society’s interest in an accurate record of the intellectual heritage of humankind.

A fitting way for Authors Alliance to celebrate its second birthday was to serve as an invited speaker at Authors, Attribution, and Integrity: Examining Moral Rights in the United States, a symposium organized by the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. on April 18.

Although you might expect otherwise, copyright law in the United States does not provide authors with the right to be acknowledged as the creator of their works. The United States has long resisted adoption of so-called “moral rights,” including the right of attribution, mostly because of objections from copyright industry firms, not from authors. However, there has been increasing momentum in particular around our adoption of a right of attribution. The Symposium reflected this renewed energy, and a building consensus toward the idea that a right of attribution could work here, to the benefit of our creative economy.

The Copyright Office announced that it will be seeking public comments on moral rights issues very soon. Authors Alliance plans to submit formal comments, but below is a summary of some of the discussion at the April 18 symposium.

On the topic of attribution, two central themes were explored. First, what would an American attribution right look like? Second, what do authors and the public stand to gain from an attribution right?

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Authors Alliance announces principles and proposals for copyright reform

Posted May 21, 2014

In conjunction with its public launch, the Authors Alliance has announced its Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform. This document outlines the Authors Alliance vision for a copyright reform effort that would work for authors who write to be read.

The Principles and Proposals identify key ways in which copyright law can better serve its constitutional mission of furthering knowledge or the “Progress of Science.”

“Promoting the Progress of Science is what our members do on a daily basis,” says Authors Alliance founder Pamela Samuelson. “So we should help shape copyright law to ensure it serves this constitutional goal.”

Access to the document is provided below. All inquiries should be directed to info@authorsalliance.org.

Authors Alliance Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform (web)
Authors Alliance Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform (pdf)