How is the right non-divestable if you can waive it? More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
> More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.
It seems to be a somewhat murky area of law. In Europe (and, I guess Canada) you can't really have public domain because of moral rights that you can't waive. IANAL but I've talked with IP lawyers about this and they've been sortof "Yes this is often kinda true." So the broad public domain that is generally true of the US government and which individuals can release in the US isn't really true in Europe as I understand it.
Europe is nearly 50 different jurisdictions, spanning multiple very different legal traditions.
But it is mostly not very murky. Moral rights and commercial rights are distinct in a wide range of jurisdictions. You can generally waive commercial rights, and that is for the most part sufficient for things to e.g. be "functionally" public domain in the ways most people care about.
What moral rights prevent is generally speaking usually things like for someone else to take your work and simply put their name on it, or keeping your name on it but making changes that might do harm to the creator in various ways.
There are nuances between jurisdictions, but it's generally not more difficult than being respectful of the effects (positive or negative) of attribution and integrity of a work.
I don't really disagree. Open source is generally recognized among European states and, from a practical perspective, permissive licenses are mostly indistinguishable from public domain other than preserving notice of the original authorship in some form. A permissive license does allow you to make pretty much any changes you want and sell it or use it in another product (or not).
That's pretty crazy, seems like a ticking time bomb to me. I assume the precise meaning of "moral rights" varies by jurisdiction, but if from the integrity part of the Canadian definition started being broadly applied it would seriously change how things like moderation need to be done. I'm not a lawyer but I wouldn't be comfortable making any kind of modifications to text submitted by a Canadian contributor, even basic stuff like PII redaction. I find the Flight Stop example here pretty chilling https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
As I say, a murky area. The MIT license was basically created because the X-Windows folks wanted to release it into the public domain but IBM would have nothing to do with it so the MIT lawyers came up with a permissive license.
> The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed – with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags"[60] – though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X[61] and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.[8]
The only legal way to waive copyright rights, is to hire an employee to produce the work. Individual contributors are not cogs in a machine, employees are!
And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!
Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.
A "marketplace of ideas" wikipedia is not wikipedia, that's twitter or maybe reddit. More importantly, your theory of copyright being unwaivable without an employee-employer relationship makes the entire internet unworkable. Nothing could accept user input of any kind unless it can be ruled uncopyrightable.
With a moral rights framework, that depends on the content of the edit.
If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.
This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.
So that's what I assumed too but it turns out that's not true, at least in Canada. The Flight Stop example was cited as an example of an artist asserting their moral rights to their art to prevent the owner from tying bows around the necks of a his flock of fiberglass geese for the holidays. For art in Canada, modifying it at all prejudices the author. The standard for other works is higher, but still nothing as high as you think.
Edit: I also wonder how or if this works in reverse, if someone wrote a fantastic article on numerology or whatever with a screed halfway through, would removing it from the article violate their moral rights? I think any framework where the answer is no is also probably going to be unworkable.
This is generally not true, but more importantly Wikipedia does not ask people to waive their copyright rights, only license it under a creative commons license. Its no different than how open source software works.
Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.