Copyright assignment

[Simone Piccardi]

On Mon, 2002-06-10 at 17:05, Loic Dachary wrote:
> Georg C. F. Greve writes:
>  > What you can transfer are "exclusive exploitation rights," which
>  > economically behave like the anglo-american Copyright, but it does not
>  > contain the "personality rights" of the author.
> 
> 	That's what we call "droits moraux" (moral rights) in France.
> Maybe Till can tell us if these "personality rights" are common to all
> countries in Europe. Are there European countries that have no such
> concept ? It exists in Germany (my guess), in France and ... ?
Also in Italy. You cannot give them away. I think is the same for the
whole UE, but I'm not sure. 

> 	"personality rights" are never mentionned in European
> contracts (paid jobs, working for a company as a freelance
> etc.). Nevertheless, it is enforceable. Instead of qualifying such
> contracts as fuzzy, I think it would be more accurate to qualify them
> as being implicit instead of explicit. If enforceability of
> "personality rights" could be questionned for copyright assignments
> made to the FSF for this reason only, it would mean that the vast
> majority of European contracts can be questioned under the same logic.
In Italy (at least) you cannot put illegal clause into contracts. So
"moral right" are never mentioned because they cannot be transferred.
But normally you have the transfer of the "exclusive exploitation
rights". Sure you can obatain to be recognized as the author of a
program, but just that, no right on the use, etc. 

> 	I agree that mentioning "personality rights" would be an better.
Don't know if it's better. In Italy you don't have to do, they are
always preserved. 
> I still fail to see why not doing so could be hazardous but I think
that
> adding it would be nice, even if it's not legally required. 
This is not clear to me, too.

>  > Of course Europeans are free to choose the FSF North America as their
>  > fiduciary just like North Americans are free to choose the FSF Europe.
> 
> 	Right. It follows the same logic as assigning copyright to
> APRIL, ANSOL, Software Libero etc. It basically relies on the amount
Associazione Software Libero, or AsSoLi, this is the correct name.

> of trust people have toward an independant moral person to fight for
> their rights. Since there are no legal links between FSF and FSF Europe
> assigning copyright to FSF Europe means that someone trust it to never
> fall under an evil influence. I'm happy to learn that people already
> are ready to grant this high level of trust the newborn FSF Europe.
I don't think that AsSoLi has, at least now (and probably also in the
future), the capability to enforce such rights; and according to the
fact that this kind of legislation will be surely armonized by the EU, I
think that it will be more efficient in any case to have a single
organization taking care of the problem.

Ciao
Simone
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