On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 02:25:36PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > In all continental Europe what you call copyrights has historically been > derived from the rights of book writers (civil rights), while in the USA & > England they derive from a corpus of law which was designed to formalize > assign copyrights to editors (monetize IP). > > The international conventions have tried to merge both approaches, but you > should be aware their roots are very different and neither the USA nor > Europe decided to dump its maw to take the others. > > Just as any other civil right european author rights are basically > inalienable. While american copyrights can always be sold, you only need > to put enough money on the table. This is, AIUI, not quite correct. The French civil law tradition of droits d'auteur includes both copyrights in the Anglo-Saxon sense of economic rights (droits patrimoniaux) as well as moral rights (droits moraux) which cannot be assigned to another and are inalienable. The US and several other countries with common law-derived conceptions of copyrights opt out of the moral rights provision of the Berne Convention; among other things, the protection of honor and reputation and the right to respect of the work violate certain First Amendment conceptions of free speech, parody, and fair use in the United States. The economic rights that mimic the Anglo-Saxon conception of copyright can be totally sold or assigned for enough money. Yet, the various inalienable moral rights can in certain cases trump these economic rights. For FOSS, the right to the respect of the work (droit au respect de l'intégrité de l'oeuvre) can present a problem since the original author can prevent any modification of his work, the right of attribution (droit de paternité) could be interpreted as allowing an author to insist upon a version of the BSD advertising clause, and the right of withdrawal (droit de retrait et de repentir) which allows the author to prevent further reproduction or distribution in exchange for financial compensation to the economic rights holder could violate the GPL. It's also not clear how the financial compensation necessary for free software would be calculated. The right to the respect of the work could certainly be the biggest hurdle. John Thacker
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