Over at Making Light, the concept of Moral Rights came up in an expanding thread on fan fiction. The idea being that they give the right for an author to say no to your story pairing Snape with Buckbeak.
Greg London had been skeptical about Moral Rights in an earlier blog entry:
Moral Rights are always defended from the point of view of some ill-defined terror that strikes fear into the hearts of various authors. It is never a specific terror, mind you, it’s always a loosely defined boogeyman that may live under your bed or may be hiding in your closet. We’re not sure. But defenders present Moral Rights as the silver bullet that will stop this boogeyman, the stake that will kill the vampire, the water that will melt the wicked witch.
I’ve seen Moral Rights asserted in a software license: The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
But I don’t know of a case where someone has used a Moral Rights clause to prevent someone from using their code.
2 Comments
Wow, that’s a really interesting idea, though, even if enforcement is problematic. Seems like it would be good for covering one’s ass, mostly. If you found out that someone was using your open code to be evil, and the moronic government wanted to label you as a terrorist, you could point to your “no evil doer” clause and rightfully claim non-assistance.
To quote:
http://www.somerightsreserved.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=393&Itemid=65
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But since I’m not a lawyer, I decided that perhaps there is some subtle way in which Moral Rights prevents evil from taking over the world that I am simply unaware of. So, I’ve decided to invite folks to submit URL’s to actual court cases that involved Moral Rights and show how they prevented some real travesty from being committed against the world. Likewise, I invite anyone who thinks Moral Rights are little more than weapons for non-existent monsters to submit actual court cases showing Moral Rights being abused by authors.
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The problem with moral rights is they allow you to do what would otherwise qualify as Breach of Contract. You work out a deal with someone to sell them your work, they give you money, they take the work and start using it for something. You cash the check and spend the money. Later on, you decide you don’t like they way the buyer is using your work. You invoke Moral Rights and try to retract the deal you had made with the person.