Intellectual Property Law: Paraphrasing of copyrighted material (Part 2 of 2)

Moral rights.

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works that are generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution and the right to the integrity of the work, which bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation without the author's permission. Paraphrasing without permission may be seen as violating moral rights. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if the author has assigned their copyright to a third party, they still maintain the moral rights to the work. Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany. They were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928. While the United States became a signatory to the Berne convention in 1989, it does not completely recognize moral rights as part of copyright law, which is seen as protecting commercial rights in intellectual property, but as part of other bodies of law such as defamation or unfair competition which protect the reputation of the author.

Edward Gibbon published the last three volumes of his masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1788, at a time when both copyright and moral rights were poorly enforced. With a small private income, he was not dependent on sales but was more concerned about the damage to his reputation from poor translations, a form of paraphrasing. He wrote, "The French, Italian and German translations have been executed with various success; but instead of patronizing, I should willingly suppress such imperfect copies which injure the character while they propagate the name of the author. The Irish pirates are at once my friends and my enemies...."

By the start of the twentieth century, U.S. decisions on unfair competition found that representing as the author's work a version of the work that substantially departed from the original was a cause of action. Section §43(a) of the Lanham Act, which protects brands and trademarks, also provides similar protection to laws based on moral rights. For any goods or services, it bans false designation of origin or a false description or representation. In Gilliam v American Broadcasting the British comedy group called Monty Python took action against the ABC network for broadcasting versions of their programs which had been correctly attributed to them but had been extensively edited, in part to remove content that their audience might consider offensive or obscene. The judgement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was in favor of Monty Python, finding the cuts might be an "actionable mutilation" that violated the Lanham Act.