Copyright Law

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Moral Right – English Copyright Law
For over a century, the United Kingdom (UK) has passed and amended a series of laws regarding copyright. The UK law perceives copyright as an intangible object whose concept originated from the Common law. According to the UK Copyrights Service, the law grants creators of “literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, sound recordings, broadcasts, films, and typographical arrangement of published editors, rights to control the ways in which their material may be used (1).” Copyright in the UK is regarded as automatic rights, in that, it immediately applies upon creation; without any need to register the original works (Digitisation and Conservation: Overview of Copyright and Moral Rights in UK Law). Copyright sets forth two types of rights, i.e., economic rights to initial owner and moral rights.
According to Tanya Aplin and Jennifer Davis, moral rights are rights that “inhere in the author of copyright works regardless of whether they retain ownership of the economic rights (Aplin and Davis 163).” They, therefore, protect an author’s personal interests in the copyrighted work. Moral rights originated primarily from European countries with civil laws such as Germany and the UK and quickly spread to the rest of the world (Aplin and Davis 163). The term moral right was drawn from the French term ‘droit moral’ which implies peculiar interests as was understood across Europe. This, therefore, meant that an author’s works represent their personality and any attempts to either distort, mutilate or damage the works was regarded as an assault on the author’s personality (Aplin and Davis 163).

The earliest known English law advocating for moral rights was the 1710 Statute of Anne. Although it was initially assumed that the English law only attributed to the economic rights of copyright owners, the Statute of Anne also championed (but not directly) for their moral rights. The statute enacted a “public health benefits policy” regarding the copyright law, which granted protection to authors as a means to motivate them to create more works (Aplin and Davis 163). According to the act, the purpose is “for the encouragement of learned men to write more useful books” (Statute of Anne 1710). It granted authors a fourteen-year exclusive right to print works.
The moral right implication of the Statute of Anne, however, was only applicable if the author maintains copyright to their work. This was demonstrated in the 1729 case of Millar v Taylor in which Andrew Millar sought legal redress to retain the rights to publish the poem of his client James Thomson following an expiration of the term that granted him exclusive rights to publish, under the Statute of Anne. The judge, Lord Mansfield, and his counterparts sided with the complainant and ruled that despite Taylor being the author and the expiration of the stipulated term under the statute, common law rights still persisted and, therefore, the publisher still retained the rights to publish the work he had purchased from the author.
The Statute of Anne was quite narrow in scope and subject to numerous interpretation which made it seem as though English courts denied authors exclusive copyrights to their works as was also evidenced in Gylex v. Wilcox in which the court ruled that an unwarranted abridgment of clearly published works doesn’t constitute an infringement of the author’s copyright. This necessitated the need for well-defined laws that gave priority to content composers and owners and protected their works. This led to the birth of the Copyrights Act of 1911.
When The 1911 Copyrights Act came into force, it revoked the common law copyright. Unlike the statute of Anne, which was only applicable in certain parts of the UK, this act was adopted in all parts of the British Empire. Under the act, copyright covered both published and unpublished works and gave sole authority to the creator; this strengthened the moral rights of an author. The act further extended the duration in which the author was protected from any form of moral or economic jeopardy by fifty years past the author’s life and broadened the scope of acts that guided in determining infringement cases of works such as sound recordings (Copyrights Act of 1911).
In the 1933 Gramophone Co Ltd V. Stephen Cawardine & Co case, the full scope of the Copyrights act of 1911 came into play. The judge, Justice Maugham acknowledged the recording company’s interpretation of provisions in the British Copyrights act which gave recording companies the “copyrights in sound recording,” and therefore the moral right to control performance or playing of the recordings in public. As per the Act, ownership of the copyright to the sound recording meant the sound recordings carried the recording company’s interests and therefore they had a legal right to control their usage in public (Atkinson and Fitzgerald 80).
The Copyright Act of 1956 constituted an even wider scope. Apart from the recognition of moral and economic rights over various types of work and other laws contained in the 1911 Act, this Act also contains the false attribution right in section 43 of the act. This right gives an individual the authority to oppose to having a dramatic, literary, musical, film or artistic work attributed falsely to them. This right became a more advanced version of the moral right and was extended to remain enforceable for twenty years after a person’s death. In section 23 of the act, it advocates for the establishment of a tribunal called Performing Right Tribunal whose sole purpose is to “exercise the jurisdiction conferred by the provisions of the Act” (Copyright Act of 1956). This act was enacted with the aim of bringing the UK on a global scale from a technological aspect relating to copyrights.
Although the previous Acts advocated for the moral right of copyright owners, it was not until the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) that the term moral right was clearly elaborated. Apart from containing all features of the previous acts, this contained a full chapter discussing the scope and jurisdiction of moral rights for copyright owners. Chapter 4 section 77 of the Act contains the moral rights covered by the act. The first of these acts is the “right to be identified as an author or director,” which covers works done by all the persons mentioned in the preceding act and others such as the author of an architectural work or director of a film and/or sound recording.
Section 78 of the act stipulates the numerous ways in which stipulated moral rights can be asserted such as generally or by “specified act or description of acts (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988).” The law is however clear in stipulating the conditions under which the right can be exempted. They include; inapplicability to “computer programs, the design of a typeface, any computer generated work.” In 2009, SAS institute sued World Programming Limited for infringing their copyright, in SAS Institute V World Programming Ltd. In the lawsuit, SAS Institute claimed that the accused had violated their terms of usage on their learning edition software. In their ruling, the EU Court of Justice stated that the copyright protection did not cover the software functionality hence there lacked any form of copyright infringement.
Moral right is also inapplicable in situations where anything is done within the copyright owner’s consent if the copyright is vested in the owner’s employer by “virtue of section” (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988). The right is also not infringed by any act, which by the virtue of the provisions in sections 30, 31,45,46,51 and 57 of the act, would not infringe copyright. The owner’s moral right is also exempted from infringement due to an act carried out in the process of examination which will not infringe rights based on provisions in chapter three of the act. The right is also exempted in situations where an act is made with an aim of reporting current events.
The right is also exempted in the publication of “newspapers, magazines, journal articles, encyclopaedia, periodicals and yearbooks, the musical or dramatic material whose sole aim is publication or they have been made available with the full consent and knowledge of the author. In Gramophone Company V Stephen Cawardine, the Gramophone Company sued Stephen Cawardine & CO for playing its music in their coffee shops without the complainant consent. The judge agreed with the complainants and established it as a legal principle. Following this decision, the complainant teamed up with other companies and established a royalty collection company and offices in parts of the UK from which they would collect artist’s royalties in all consented areas and pay them. Finally, the right is limited to “a work in which Crown Copyright or parliament copyright subsists or in which copyright originally vested in an international organization by virtue of section 168 (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988).”
A different moral right covered under the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act is the “right to object to derogatory treatment of work.” Some of the exemptions to this moral right include; limitation to computer generated tasks, work done with the intentions of reporting on current events, in publication or published print media and sound recordings following the owners’ consent, an act which permits assumption on copyright expiry dates, acts done in aim of omitting an offence and complying with legal duty. These right’s qualification criteria are similar to that of the previous moral right discussed. It is worth noting that moral rights can also be infringed by possession or handling of infringing articles when conducting a business, when selling or hiring, distribution or public exhibition. The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 defines an infringing article as; “means of a worker a copy of work which has been subjected to derogatory treatment within the meaning of section 80 and,” the act adds, “has been or is likely to be the subject of any of the acts mentioned in that section in circumstances infringing that right (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988).”
There a number of negative and positivity associated with the moral right regime regarding copyright, Negative aspects associated with moral rights include an unrealistic conception of authorship (Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes 1). This comes from the common assumption that the author is an independent creative genius whose personality is embedded in the work. This is somehow disrespectful to other contributors involved in the creative process as the author or copyright owner usually obtains all recognition. According to Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes (1), moral rights are also alien. This is because they obtain their origin from global copyright systems and can therefore not be assimilated into the common law system. Moral rights can, therefore, be assumed to represent “an unjustified legal intervention in the free market (Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes 1)”. Moral rights also seem to prioritize personal interests against a public one and hinder the formation of derivative types of creation such as freedom of expression, e.g., by preventing a parody’s publication.
One of the benefits associated with the moral rights is the ability of an author to maintain a durable creational bond between them and their work (Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes 1). Through the right to speak against derogatory treatment of their work, authors, directors and other copyright owners command the respect and support they require in appreciation of their work. Copyright owners are also able to control the integrity of their work since moral rights grant them control over the form of their work. In case a copyright owner feels that they receive excessive criticism, the moral right feature in their copyright allows them to object (Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes 1).
Other benefits of moral rights in copyright are the right and freedom to make corrections to their work, the authority to object any form of destruction or alteration of their work, the right to, at any one point and withdraw their work from circulation in case a moral right is infringed. According to Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes, the owner reserves right of attribution upon completion of the work while at the same time enjoy protection against false attribution (1). Despite the numerous criticisms of moral rights in copyrights, the benefits associated with copywriting are far much crucial.

Works Cited
Aplin, Tanya, and Jennifer Davis. “Intellectual property law: text, cases, and materials.” Oxford University Press, 2013.
Atkinson, Benedict, and Brian Fitzgerald. “Short History of Copyright.” Springer International Pu, 2016.
Copyright Act of 1911. Geo 65. c. 46. 1911. Print.
Copyright Act of 1956. Eliz.2. c. 74. 1956. Print.
Copyright Design and Patent Act of 1988. c. 48. 1988. Print.
Copyright Law Moral Rights Notes. “Copyright Law Moral Rights | Oxbridge Notes the United Kingdom, www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk/revision_notes/law-intellectual-property-law/samples/copyright-law-moral-rights.
“Digitisation and Conservation: Overview of Copyright and Moral Rights in UK Law.” Tate, www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/08/digitisation-and-conservation-overview-of-copyright-and-moral-rights-in-uk-law.
“Statute of Anne.” 8 Ann. c. 19- 21. 1710. Print
“UK copyright law.” P-01: UK Copyright Law fact sheet, www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law.