Moral rights kill culture
<rant>
Moral rights of creators are inventions grounded in a bad analogy with property rights.
If you want to maintain your “moral right” to what you’ve written, then don’t publish it.
If you publish it, you are making it public. Thank you for doing so.
You will make money from it for some fixed period — a period designed to provide you (but not necessarily Stephen King) with sufficient incentive to continue to create and publish works, but a short enough period that creative works can be assimilated by the culture.
Why put limits on the author’s exclusive right to publish? To keep culture lively. Which is the same as keeping that culture alive.
Cultural assimilation requires the freedom to talk about your work, to reuse it, misuse it, abuse it, to get it terribly wrong, to make it our own as individuals, to make it ours as a culture.
Imagine a Renaissance in which “moral rights” were enforced. Can’t.
Moral rights kill culture.
(Note that this applies to works that are published as copies. Please don’t take a hammer to any irreplaceable statues. Thanks.)
</rant>
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
