Examining Contracts-based Moral Rights through Academic and Trade Publishing

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.

Keywords: Moral Rights, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Academic Publishing, Contracts