AT ISSUE: Authorial Reputation & Integrity

Authorial reputation and integrity are key issues for Authors Alliance. We work to ensure that authors can make their contributions to knowledge and culture widely available without sacrificing their interests in reputation and integrity. It is important to authors themselves and to our collective cultural heritage for contributions to knowledge and culture to be accurately attributed to their authors and for ideas to be subjected to fair scrutiny by reviewers and readers.

For example:

• As we wrote in our Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, the law should recognize the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of their works. This is especially important for authors who create in order to contribute to knowledge and culture. Attribution serves not only authors’ interests, 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 and cultural heritage of humankind.

• As we explained in comments to the U.S. Copyright Office, we support creators’ rights to integrity and attribution (subject to some limitations and exceptions that protect downstream creative reuse) and would like to see these non-economic authorial rights formally recognized in U.S. copyright law.

• We also encourage Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office to recognize other non-economic author rights, such as the right to revive one’s work if it is no longer available commercially and the right to revise one’s work over time.