There's an interesting conversation going on between Lessig and Thompson regarding the purpose of the Creative Commons license and its effect on moral rights.
It begins with a
BBC article from Bill Thompson:
Unfortunately most of the copyfighters take the US view of copyright as entirely about economics, and neither understand nor are interested in moral rights.
Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who is leading the movement to revise US copyright, dismisses it as "a French idea" that has no real usefulness.
He is wrong, I believe, but I can see no way to provide moral rights in a form useful to creative people within the rebalanced approach to the economic aspects of copyright that Lessig, Cory Doctorow and others are proposing.
Thompson is then
quoted in The Register:
"Lessig doesn't understand why people in Europe care about an author's moral rights, which are inalienable in European law. And because he doesn't understand, he dismisses it. To an American constitutional lawyer copyright is simply an economic matter."
Not intending to come across so "brutally,"
Thompson clarifies:
[Creative Commons] is a good idea, and a great way of poking the beast with a stick and stirring up debate and discussion. . . . I just want it to address an issue which really matters to me as a creator: how my moral rights can be asserted and protected.
Thompson cites
GrepLaw in support:
Lessig and many other U.S. scholars misses the point of authorship and moral rights - which is perhaps the most fundamental reason for introducing copyright protection at all, deriving from the ideas developed during the French revolution.
Finally,
Lessig rebuts:
The purpose of the license is to enable the artist or creator to mark his or her copyrighted work with the freedom he or she intends the work to carry. . . . It is simply a license that says "if you use my copyrighted work in ways that would otherwise infringe my exclusive rights, I won't sue you if you have abided by this license."
Moral rights . . . don't admit of such easy manipulation. In many jurisdictions that protect moral rights, you can't just automatically give away the moral right, without knowing something about how, or in what context, the work is to be used. For those jurisdictions then, a Creative Commons-like mechanism just wouldn't work. Such a mechanism couldn't succeed, in other words, in effecting an agreement about such moral rights. . . .
So our response to these jurisdictions is simple: we don't purport to affect the moral rights at all. They are left as they would be, because our tool can't effectively do anything about them. . . .
(Does aspirin dismiss cancer just because it can't cure it?) . . .
But I do believe that copyright was about economics. And I continue to believe copyright is important, primarily for economic reasons. But that again is precisely why we wanted to create a simpler copyright, for the many many creators who either are not creating for economic ends, or who believe that control over their creativity is not a necessary means to their economic success.
I recommend reading the rest of Lessig's post, which does a great job of explaining the limited purpose of the Creative Commons license.
Update: More at
Infothought (Feb. 27, 2005 - Bill Thompson, Creative Commons, and "Moral Rights" in Copyright) (Hat tip:
Copyfight).
