Moral Rights for Musicians: A Primer
FutureBlog 2016-05-14
Summary:
In the United States, most copyright law deals exclusively with “economic rights”, or rights associated with the money and the economic value of creative work. These rights are incredibly important as they allow creators to prevent others copying/distributing their works, making new works based upon their creation and publicly performing it without a license.
These rights are why rightsholders can sue to block unlicensed CDs from being printed and why songs can’t be covered without a license fee to the songwriter.
But money isn’t everything. Ellsewhere in the world, creators enjoy a separate set of rights known as “moral rights.” The term comes from the French language and might actually be better translated as “personality rights”; it incartists are able to protect their reputation by ensuring that they receive attribution when their work is used and that they can object to uses that they see as harmful to their name.