Deconstructing Moral Rights

One of the most noteworthy developments in transnational copyright law over the past twenty years has been the adoption of statutory moral rights regimes in a number of countries that had previously ardently rejected the civil law concept of moral rights as completely alien to their legal tradition, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. The standard scholarly reaction to these developments is to ask what they mean for the two classic questions of comparative moral rights law, namely whether the common law countries fulall the requirements for moral rights protection under international law and whether the common law countries provide a degree of protection comparable to that available in civil law countries.1 In this context, the enactment of statutory moral rights appears to be simply another factor to be considered when measuring the substantive level of moral rights protection in the United States, just as the Supreme Court’s recent Dastar decision,2 the copyright management information provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998,3 or the Family Movie Act of 20054 are factors