Policy for attribution

[Philippe Verdy]

From: "Matthew Seth Flaschen" <superm40 at comcast.net>
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
> 
>> Do you know that any media without a clear attribution of its author is illegal in many countries, because it's impossible to assert if the licencing terms are valid, or to contact the true authors to see if the publication was authorized and not simply stolen?
> 
> You're referring of course to moral rights.  IANAL, but I believe moral 
> rights are fulfilled by clear copyright notices.  I have already 
> acknowledged the necessity of copyright notices.

I have absolutely no idea what "moral rights" means in terms of French law, which recognizes the author's right (which remains valid for 70 years, plus war time as determined by special legislation, even if all other rights have been transfered, except when authors made their work as part of their regular job for which they were employed by a company, in which case the author's right belongs to the organization and is transferable as a regular service) specially like artistic creations (remember the rights applicable to photographies of buildings in France and some other European countries, where the design is protected by the author's right of architects, even if the photo is itself an artistic creation that includes other artistic rights for the photograph, and then the rights of reproduction, and some other rights belonging to the State notably taxes collected on numeric, magnetic or wave spectre supports, or taxes on some materials due to pollution caused by inks, toners, and so on, or simply on some kind of medias that have public support such as TV tax collected with residential taxes: all these imply additional costs that must be supported even when the creation is provided free of special charge for the product itself);

I don't know the "moral right" of authors and creators in France, only the rights of victims (of accidents or after crimes or public insults or lies dissiminated publicly about them) and on the privacy of individual people (of their own image, or of their private health, religion, political or union affiliation, sexual gender, race and handicaps: there are even recent legal attempts to keep the people names and residence addresses private in curriculum vitaes for candidates to jobs, to avoid selection of candidates by ethnic/racial motives or social preferences; this is already true since long for official exams like the baccalaureat where the student works are anonymous and identified by detachable matching numbers on certified forms). Those are the moral rights for which French courts can provide to victims the benefit of additional fines paid by infringers for moral damages, plus possibly some legal interest rates.