487e1a40@news.povray.org...
> I would disagree with this, actually - just look at how copyright has
> been extended over the years for everyone in order to protect Mickey
> Mouse (and I'm serious about that one).  In the US, there is "implied
> copyright" which means even if the author doesn't declare a copyright,
> the author's work is covered by copyright law and they have rights to
> their creation.

The Bono act is about copyright (in this case corporate copyright). Again, 
the US tradition is (rather exclusively) about copyright (patrimonial 
rights), not moral rights. It would be interesting to know what kind of 
moral rights have the individual Disney artists on the characters they 
created as Disney employees... While patrimonial rights are attached to the 
work itself, moral rights are attached to the author (or to the author's 
heirs) as a person. These rights are permanent, cannot be revoked and can 
only be transmitted to a third party after the author's death. If I create 
something, my moral rights remain intact whatever rights I grant to somebody 
else.
As Warp says, I "own" my work, not so much as a property (copyright), but as 
an extension of myself and my personality (the French actually use the word 

cannot say "I can do whatever I want with this creation because the rights 
were transferred to me by the author", because one cannot buy the moral 
rights from a living author (or from the author's heirs, see the case of the 
Carmen Jones movie that was forbidden in Europe for several decades). For 
instance, in French law, an author has a "right to repent" and can cancel 
any patrimonial rights that were granted to third parties and remove the 
work from public circulation. In other words, in this tradition, moral 
rights trump patrimonial rights. The goblins in Harry Potter are extreme 
moral rights activists, as they consider that every object they've done is 
theirs forever, no matter who buys it... A case example of the difference 
has been the controversy around film colourisation 
(http://www.caslon.com.au/mrcasesnote2.htm) (this is getting off-topic btw).

G.

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