--- Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> からの メッセージ: > Hi Mark, > On Thursday 24 April 2003 19:37, Mark Rafn wrote: > > A few people have brought up the topic of Moral > Rights, with > > which I am not very familiar. They sound like > some sort of > > meta-copyright which an author cannot assign, and > may not be > > able to grant permission over. > > > > Does anyone have a pointer to some description of > these rights > > that a layman like myself might understand? I'm > particularly > > interested in how they relate to the GFDL and why > they would > > apply to documentation and not to software. > > * * * IANAL * * *
** This is not legal advice. This is a general statement of law. ** I've reviewed this issue a couple years ago in an article format (which is I think approachable to a layman, but it is a law review piece so no promises.. :) Whether documentation and software are treated differently for moral rights will depend on the jurisdiction. Remember, though, that moral rights is a continental tradition, that was not recognized in common law jurisdictions generally. Might be of interest for example, that the U.S. signed on to Berne finally, and basically said, "uh, we're already protecting moral rights... sortof... so we need not change our domestic law." Software is generally treated differently though and I reference a variety of sources that give a country by country analysis. I focused on Japan, U.S., and others. In the paper, I advocated an assertion of a moral right in software for free and open source developers, because of the strong nexus between the rights sought, eg. right to attribution and integrity of the work, and the lack of much nexus between the rights generally afforded under copyright. I argued that for someone more interested in "protecting" their work for public interest'y reason, using a regime based on the moralistic rights of an author makes better sense than one focused on maximized economic utility. The article provides several cites for further research, but I'd be happy to discuss the topic more here. I should revisit that article so comments are very welcomed. http://www.nihonlinks.com/JamesMiller/OpenSourceMoralRights/ http://www.nihonlinks.com/JamesMiller/OpenSourceMoralRights/CurrentDraft.pdf -- James Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! BB is Broadband by Yahoo! http://bb.yahoo.co.jp/