Understanding Intellectual Property: About Moral Rights and Economic Effects

Moral rights must be carefully studied by the business community, which could easily and wrongly believe that the intellectual property business involves only intellectual property economic rights. This is an introduction meant to reveal a contrasting legal and economic reality concerning the effects of the moral rights over the economic relations. Any unclear regulation must be interpreted in favour of the author, as they prevail over the interests of all other interested persons and, by consequence, any obligation assumed by the author or a contractor thereof, may be restricted, i.e. extended, by claiming that the author’s moral rights are violated or that they are not fully protected. Any kind of use of the protected creation involving the economic rights, is indissolubly connected to the work’s authorship claiming and, very often, with the work’s integrity compliance or withdrawal right. Any contract concluded between a person acquiring economic rights over an intangible asset, cannot deny or diminish author’s moral rights. The disclosure right is the decision of the author to put his work on the market, in contact with the public. After exhaustion, regardless the voluntary or the involuntary aspects, the disclosure right can no longer be breached, so that following disclosure of the intellectual property, any possible use of it without author’s consent violates only the economic rights and, possibly, other moral rights, such as the right to authorship of work and the right to withdraw the work, according to the concrete circumstances of the case. Conditioning the exhaustion of the disclosure right by a voluntary disclosure – whether there is the intent of disclosure on the part of the author or an ambiguous agreement – is wrong and inevitably leads to obstruction of commercial circuit.