From: John Cox <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2015 09:29:54 +0100

Just a word of clarification on moral rights and the CC licences.

'Moral rights' are part of copyright law throughout the European Union, and in many other jurisdictions.  The USA is in a minority in not providing for moral rights - except for certain categories of photography and fine art, as Sandy points out.

Moral rights are additional to what we now call the 'economic rights' enshrined in copyright.  They are designed to protect the author.   Principally they are:

a. attribution is the right of an author of a work to be identified as such with any edition of the work.

b. integrity is the right of an author to object to ‘derogatory’ treatment of a work. That means any distortion or any other treatment that damages its meaning and/or the author's reputation.

Moral rights are personal to the author.  They cannot be assigned to someone else - e.g. to a publisher.  They can ONLY be waived by the author in writing.   So a CC licence put out by a publisher purporting to waive an author's moral rights simply has no effect, which is why the CC licence does not make provision for them.


John Cox
Rookwood, Bradden
TOWCESTER
Northants NN12 8ED
United Kingdom
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 22:56:45 -0500

That's a reasonable reply, and I can understand why there might be differences of opinion among OA monograph publishers. So far in the U.S. presses that have gone into monograph publishing in an OA mode have needed the revenue stream generated by the sale of POD editions; so, too, do some of the UK publishing operations like Bloomsbury Academic and the Knowledge Unlatched project launched by Frances Pinter after she left Bloomsbury. If OA monograph publishing is fully subsidized and needs no extra source of income, then CC BY can make more sense.  If I were a humanities scholar, though, I would not fully trust in the type of informal norms you cite as prevalent in science, especially since once a translation is done and offered for free, the incentive for anyone to do another translation is greatly reduced and a poor translation may be worse than having none at all.

With respect to your second point, I am curious whether the CC BY license waives "moral rights," which exist under European but not (except with respect to certain types of fine art) in the US. If not, then isn't this an additional "restriction" that the CC  license should acknowledge?  When the CC licenses were first promulgated, they were accompanied by a statement that acknowledged the existence of such moral rights, but in later versions this language has disappeared.

Sandy Thatcher