Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software? (Was: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL
Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@debian.org>:
> > We already have "OT" in the subject, so may I ask whether this "moral
> > right" ceases with the death of the author,
>
> For non-software, it was 50 years after the death of the author, it is
> now 70 (corporations lobbied a lot for that). For software, I'm not
> sure.
Then put me down as someone who is opposed to moral rights. There's no
way I want someone else after my death using my moral rights to
override the licence I gave when I was alive.
Or is there perhaps a work-around? Would it be possibly to set up a
"moral rights non-enforcement organisation", which doesn't actually do
anything, and is indeed constituted so as to be incapable of ever
doing anything, and then have authors bequeath their moral rights to
this organisation? Or does the law prevent moral rights from being
held by a corporation even after the author's death?
> > contract that tries to do so is unenforceable. However, presumably
> > that doesn't stop company X from paying a certain sum every month to
> > the author with the understanding that payments will cease if the
> > author tries to assert her moral rights, or the company not suing the
> > author so long as the author doesn't assert her moral rights.
>
> And the Mafia can shoot you if you do not do what they want. Every
> legal system has such limits.
It is illegal for the Mafia to shoot or threaten to shoot me. However,
it is probably not illegal for a company to stop paying me a monthly
"donation".
> > cases there is no contract that needs to be enforced by the courts, so
> > any attempt by the legal system to prevent the "moral right" from
> > being waived through contract law is bound to fail.
>
> This is clearly wrong: authors win in court against their employers
> often.
However, in the absense of a contract I presumably cannot force a
former employer to continue paying me a monthly "donation".
Note: I'm not claiming that there is no difference between negotiable
and non-negotiable rights. I'm just pointing out a likely limitation
to non-negotiability which has nothing to do with your Mafia scenario.
Perhaps there is some way the law can overcome this limitation, but I
doubt it, because they've never managed to stop prostitution, for
which a comparable legal situation exists in many jurisdictions.
This is way off topic, so let's kill this subthread, but I would like
to know the answer to my question about inheritance of moral rights.
Edmund
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