1) RE: Moral Rights in technical documentation

I am responding to the message that appears below.

My answer is based on the legal system I know best, that is France.

First, regarding softwarre, moral right protection is very thin and merely includes the right to attribution, that is principally the right for the creator of the software to have his or her name reproduced on each copy of the work. (Article L. 121-7 and Court of Appeal of Douai, July 1st 1996 : PIBD 1997 III, p. 129.

Second, copyright regime governing the documentation is not the same as that of the sofware (whose legal regime differs from other more traditional type of works). Documentation is characterized as a literary work. Accordingly, the creator of such work (provided it is original, that is the prerequirement for copyright protection, bearing in mind that the standard of originality in France is higher - work shall bear in principle the imprint of the author's personality - than that in the U.S. - Feist case, de minimis criterion) enjoys all the moral rights, such as the right of integrity, the right of withdrawal, the right of attribution and the right of divulgation (for further details, See A. Lucas, France, in International Copyright Law and Practice, P. Geller). Moral right in France is not transferable and unwaivable, and this is a national and international public policy rule (Huston case, French Supreme Court 1991), which means that any contractual provision to the contrary is void and null.

Hope this will be helpful,

Alan Ragueneau
Ph.D. candidate Nantes Universitys France

ORIGINAL MESSAGE
Sub: RE: Moral Rights in technical documentation

  Date:   Tue, 25 Mar 2003 10:54:20 +0100

  From:    "I.R.Maturana" <irm[_at_]myrealbox.com>

  To:    <cni-copyright[_at_]cni.org>

BTW, can somebody explain when moral rights apply to technical documentation ?
Is the documentation of a software protected the same than the software itself ?

[I.R.Maturana -- Trad En>[ES<>FR] - http://www.in3activa.net ] PLT/LPT License: http://www.in3activa.org/doc/es/LPT-ES.html Received on Fri Apr 04 2003 - 03:07:21 GMT