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.

“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

“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.”