Simon on Copyright, Moral Rights, and the Social Self @david__simon @Harvard_Law

David A. Simon, Harvard Law School, is publishing Copyright, Moral Rights, and the Social Self in volume 34 of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (2023). Here is the abstract.

Moral rights—noneconomic rights that enable authors to control how their copyrighted work is divulged, attributed, modified, and withdrawn—are grounded on the Investment Theory: when an author creates a work, she invests part of her self in it. Because the work is an extension of the author’s “self,” special rights—not merely economic rights—are needed to protect it. Although intuitive, the rationale raises two central questions any moral rights theorist must address: how can an author invest her “self” in a work, and how might the law protect this investment? Moral rights scholars have not provided a satisfactory answer to the first question, making the second one difficult to address. This Article argues that an idea from social psychology might help answer the first question and shape how we respond to the second. Rather than some philosophical or abstract conception of the self, the authorial self the law protects is the social one: the self created and maintained through social interaction. On this account, moral rights are tools to present and manage aspects of this social self. They are limited “rights of impression management.” This framing enables two analytical moves. First, it precisifies what moral rights protect (the social self as externalized in the work) and the “harm” they protect against (potential inconsistencies in that self). Second, it provides a framework for discussing how moral rights ought to protect the self from harm, raising the ultimate question of whether and to what extent the Investment Theory is justified.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.