Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?
Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet <galactus@stack.nl> writes:
> As far as I know, the heirs must follow the author's intentions
> when applying the inherited moral right. They cannot decide
> for themselves whether *they* like the change, they must guess
> whether the now deceased author would have liked it.
But the author is dead. And people all the time guess wrong. For
example, imagine a closeted gay author who died fifty years ago. His
heirs are homophobic, and oppose the publication of any biography that
accurately describes the man's life. And accordingly they oppose any
use of his works in the biography.
But the man himself might well, if he were alive today, rejoice in the
more tolerant atmosphere we now share, deplore the bigotry of his
heirs, and happily agree to publication.
What the person thinks is defamatory, and what the heirs think, are
simply not the same thing. Even if the heirs do their very best job,
the whole point of the set up is that you *discount* what the author
says, because the author *cannot* be deemed to be renouncing the
right. If the heirs can convince a court, it won't matter at all
whether they are right.
> Heirs unfortunately sometimes do things to works that the author
> probably would not have liked (like publishing unpublished works
> he considered not good enough). Strangely enough no one can do
> anything about that.
Strangely? THE MAN IS DEAD. Dead men have no rights. How hard is
this?
> By giving a copyright license you don't give up your moral
> rights. It would be unreasonable to say that if you license
> a work for publication, you could then assert your moral
> right to stop that publication. I would argue that if the
> publication license were general like with free software,
> you couldn't stop any further publication.
I don't think that you *have* any such moral rights. I think it's a
crazy and insane concept, and I will fight it tooth and nail.
Among other things, it totally contradicts the notion of free
software, especially given that these rights cannot be renounced.
Thomas
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