Re: droit de suite

On 04/06/2000, Part Sloane <patsloane[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/06/2000, Jon Noring <noring[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, this is radical, but I present it as a counterweight to the scary
> > "copyright is a natural right" crowd on this mailing list, whose motives
> > are pure, but who are, in my opinion, very short-sighted and don't see
> > the long-term negative ramifications of their position.
>
> I don't believe the concept of "natural rights" plays much of a role
> in American law today. Could you be thinking of the 18th and 19th
> centuries, when the term was bandied about a lot?

To the contrary: virtually all of the changes made in U.S. law from 1976 to the present have been inspired or justified, directly or indirectly, by the natural rights view. In particular, all of the changes made to help "harmonize" U.S. law with European law have been in the direction of making U.S. law more "natural rights" oriented and less "incentive" or "utilitarian" oriented.

Examples: The change from a registration-and-notice based system to automatic protection from the moment of fixation; the change from registration-based renewal to automatic renewal; the change from a fixed term to a term based on the life of the author; the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act; protection for architectural works; restoration of foreign copyrights; anti-bootlegging legislation; digital public performance rights for sound recordings; and moral rights legislation.

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School
<tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> Received on Fri Apr 07 2000 - 19:03:15 GMT