Monday, February 25, 2008

Economic Right, Moral Right, and Database

More from the Authorship Collaborative of CWRU's English Department:

Copyright protections are ubiquitous to contemporary Western societies, but the rationales behind them are widely divergent. The two basic categories of defense for copyright are the doctrine of Economic Right and the doctrine of Moral Right. Economic Right maintains that copyright protections are intended to encourage innovation by protecting what is rightfully the property of the creator because of his labor and "creative spark," and is thus concerned more with balancing the rights of creators with market access. On the other hand, Moral Right views the work as being in some way an extension of the creator's self, and therefore sees a need for more expansive protections. This difference generally represents the difference between the American (economic) justification and the European (moral) justification, and is well illustrated by the differing approaches of the United States and the European Union to the question of databases.

No comments: