Protecting Your Company's Intellectual Property: A Practical Guide to Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents & Trade Secrets

Moral Rights

Artists are always concerned that their works be attributed to them and that their works not be distorted or mutilated. Whereas continental Europe has recognized these rights for years, the United States has been slower to protect such rights of authors, generally called moral rights because they are independent of authors' economic rights in their works. The right to claim authorship of a work is known as the right of attribution, and the right to ensure that one's work is not mutilated is known as the right of integrity. These moral rights survive transfer of an author's work so that even after the author has sold his or her work, the work cannot be destroyed or mutilated.

In 1990, with the passage of the Visual Artists Rights ...