ABSTRACT
The US has a ‘patchwork’ of specific and non-specific laws that directly or incidentally govern moral rights. This article focuses on a subset of this patchwork, contracts and copyright, and examines the utilitarian implications of effectuating attribution and integrity moral rights through the two (‘contracts-based moral rights’). The article will examine the advantages and disadvantages of contracts-based moral rights by contrasting the examples of academic and trade public publishing. Ultimately, this article argues that the patchwork’s limitations are likely to affect the creative incentives of only a subset of authors: sophisticated but poorly resourced ones. However, the contract-based system is also more likely to generate ex-post psychic harms from the moral rights violations.
Chen, George, Examining Contracts-based Moral Rights through Academic and Trade Publishing (May 2, 2022).
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