‘Sharing Is Caring’: Creative Commons, Transformative Culture, and Moral Rights Protection

Abstract

The practice of sharing works free from traditional legal reservations, aims to mark both ideological and systemic distance from the exclusive proprietary regime of copyright. The positive involvement of the public in creativity acts is a defining feature of transformative culture in the digital sphere, which encourages creative collaborations between several people, without any limitation in space or time. Moral rights regimes are antithetical to these practices. This chapter will explore the moral rights challenges emerging from transformative culture. We will take the example of Creative Commons licenses and their interaction with internationally recognized moral rights. We conclude that the chilling effects of this legal uncertainty linked to moral rights enforcement could hurt copyright as a whole, but that moral rights can still constitute a strong defence mechanism against modern risks related to digital transformative creativity.

Keywords: commons, moral rights, user generated content, Creative Commons, public domain