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Habilitation
Immaterialgüter- und Wettbewerbsrecht

Moral Rights of Authors: What’s the Future for its Legal Situation?

This project aims to answer to the main question: “Moral Rights of Authors: What’s the future for its legal situation?” and will reflect the new point of view to the legal protection of the moral rights considering new technologic developments and analyzing different legal arrangement types of ‘moral rights’ in European law systems and Copyright law.

Last Update: 20.03.14

In order to achieve the aim of the project, first of all the literature search of “moral rights” for French law and International law has been done. Additionally, at the beginning, the historical development of moral right in European law system has been examined. Also two different main “moral right” theories (“monist and dualist theory”) and theirs actual legal influences have been taken into account.

The starting point was the French law. French law has very important place due to its initiator character in the context of moral rights. Following analyse of the principal works on moral rights in French law and also on comparative law (such as German law and Suisse law), the researches on moral rights type has been accomplished. Hereby research on different legal moral right types, did not remain limited only in doctrinal side. The judicial side also needed to be viewed in scope of this work.

The judicial approaches especially in French law and also German law have been strictly examined. This research has helped to understand different point of views regarding same kind of moral rights by different judiciaries.

The relationship between different legal categories of moral rights in different system has been taken into account. Also the relation between moral rights types -as right of divulgation, right of integrity or right of paternity- was another important subject to analyse. The grey areas between moral rights categories and also between moral rights and personality rights were a different challenge of this work to handle. Following questions is an example of this relationship: “What are the legal solutions of different legal systems to moral rights of deceased authors?” of “Where is the boundary between the personality of the author and its moral right?”

Another important trivet of hereby work is the impact of the new technologies on moral rights. (For example: Colorisation of a black&white movie). In other words, could moral rights be interpreted as an obstacle to new technologic developments especially which are brought by new Internet applications? In this way, some questions have arrived such as “what are the new conflicts raising from the new technologies about moral rights?”

Beside European law system, it was interesting to observe Copyright law system and its approach to moral rights. The fact that the acceptance and the legal protection of moral rights are really limited in copyright law countries and its reasons were important in the extent of this work. After observing copyright moral right system the following new questions raised: “What are the suggestions of the authors on the subject of moral rights in copyright law system?” “Moral rights are they really necessary for the future?”

Persons

Project Manager

Yalçin Tosun

Supervisor

Dr. Kaya Köklü

Main Areas of Research

Funktionen, Zielsetzungen, Werte und Wertungskriterien