Roberta Rosenthal Kwall

I’m going to try to do a serious review of this eventually, but basically, Kwall argues that highly creative works express the author’s personal meaning and message, and that this connection justifies granting authors rights of attribution and rights against distortion much more broadly than US law presently does, though she doesn’t quite think European versions would work in the US. I don’t think I ever really understood “meaning and message,” but she believes that this highly personal connection is “intrinsic” to the right kind of authors. I don’t have anything against attribution norms, but I think attribution rights are a terrible idea, and her proposal to limit the remedy to injunctive relief (a court order requiring attribution or a disclaimer of agreement) and not damages except in special cases did not reassure me. Every author thinks her own case is special, which is kind of the point that would impel her to sue over a perceived violation of her moral rights. So to me the proposal is just another way that authors/copyright owners could threaten subsequent creators to shut them up (since pure copying would almost never violate moral rights—there’s no distortion and usually no failure to attribute).… (meer)