Moral Rights - in The United States

In The United States

Moral rights have had a less robust tradition in the United States. Copyright law in the United States emphasizes protection of financial reward over protection of creative attribution. The exclusive rights tradition in the United States is inconsistent with the notion of moral rights as it was constituted in the Civil Code tradition stemming from post-Revolutionary France. When the United States signed the Berne Convention, it stipulated that the Convention's "moral rights" provisions were addressed sufficiently by other statutes, such as laws covering slander and libel.

The United States Supreme Court affirmed the selection of the Berne Convention Copy regime for Articles 1-21 by Congress in 1994. The Court ruled in Golan v. Holder, (10-545) that this selection was a legitimate Congressional Action and didn't violate the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled explicitly that removing art from the public domain did not disturb Free Speech. The moral rights were less robust in the United States for centuries but are now affirmed to be the same as the Berne Convention.

Some individual states have moral rights laws, particularly pertaining to visual art and artists (See, e.g. California Art Preservation Act, Artists Authorship Rights Act (New York)). However it is unclear if these laws, or portions thereof, are preempted by federal law including VARA.

The Monty Python comedy troupe made a claim of "mutilation" (akin to a moral rights claim) in 1975 in legal proceedings against American TV network ABC for airing re-edited versions of Monty Python's Flying Circus. However, the case was primarily decided on the basis of whether the BBC was licensed in such a way as to allow ABC to edit the videos (paragraph 20).