David A. Simon (Northeastern University School of Law) has posted Monastic Moral Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Copyright law grants authors special non-economic “moral rights” to prevent others from using their works in certain ways. Unlike economic rights, which protect the author’s ability to generate returns, non-economic rights protect the author’s “special relationship” with her work—a relationship that arises from investing one’s personality into the work by creating it. In its strongest “monastic” form, moral rights give the author the absolute power to prevent any use that offends her sensibilities. While the monastic view of moral rights exists in only a few countries, the sentiment underlying it is pervasive in moral rights theory: an author’s claims are superior to all others because only the author knows when harm occurs, regardless of others’ views. In other words, certain uses of works result in the author experiencing harm that no one else can experience and that does not depend on what others think. This Article asks and evaluates the following question: can this type of internal harm—based only on the author’s subjective experience—justify a monastic version of moral rights?
Fascinating. Highly recommended.