Additional author rights

James H. Schmitz

In addition to copyright (the right of the author to receive a part of the profits from the sale of his work), other rights should also be guaranteed. The most important is the right to the integrity of the work, recognized by the Berne Convention:

The author shall retain the right ... to object to any deformation, mutilation or other modification of his [work].

The downside is that dead authors can hardly object. 

Unfortunately, this right is less protected than the copyright, as a few examples will show:

Freedom and prior censorship

Wikipedia Logo

On July 5, 2018 the European Parliament rejected, by 318 votes against 278, the proposal for the Copyright Directive in the European Single Market. In the days leading up to this vote, there were many public and private activities in favor and against the proposal, which after this defeat will have to be debated again in committee, probably with amendments. The most controversial points of the proposal, those that gathered most rejection, were incorporated in two articles of the regulation:

• Article 11: Establishes what has been popularly called the Google tax. It makes it compulsory, for those responsible for web pages, to request permission, and if the copyright owners wish, to pay a fee, for including a link to a news or copyright owner that has appeared in any of the media. The most favored by this article are not individual authors, but mass media (especially the press on the Internet), the main defenders of this measure.

The MEPs who defended this article argue that it does not affect individuals or the Wikipedia, although the latter felt so threatened, that it declared a strike for the first time in its history, so that access to the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the Wikipedia was closed during the day before the vote. The problem is, this article may be expressed so ambiguously that, although just now may not apply to individuals or to Wikipedia, there are no guarantees that in the future this cannot be done.

The chaos of copyright rules

When publishers and author associations complain about the huge amount of copyright violation in piratical download of digital publications, including electronic books (e-books), they should start by trying to put a little order in the chaos of copyright laws, which has become outstanding since Internet has made easy the exchange of digital files between world-wide users. Let us consider a few examples of this chaos:

·         In the USA, every book published before 1923 is in the public domain. For those published between 1923 and 1963, the default duration was 28 years after publication, which could be extended to 95 by renewing the copyright. The latter became the copyright duration for all books between 1964 and 1977. After 1978, copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death.