The Rights of Authors
The Rights of Authors
In this chapter, I consider the central theories proposed to ground the right of copyright: that copyright is an instrumental right, that it is a natural right, and that it is a “personality” right. After showing why each of these views ultimately fails to ground copyright, I argue that the right of copyright should centrally reflect the nature of authorship, the nature of the things authored, and what it is we value about these, namely, creativity—the bringing about of a thing (a work) which did not previously exist. I argue that the author’s creative act and the nature of the work created give rise to the author’s ownership of the work—a natural right to determine the conditions under which that work may be copied.
Keywords: copyright, instrumental rights, natural rights, personality rights, creativity
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