I think deliberate misattribution is already taken care in other parts of the law. This is like putting my name on someone else’s work, which is clearly fraud.

I agree that flowing money through to an author at the point of transaction does seem to make sense, but there is no distinction for this in the law.

An option would be a “value added” royalty scheme. Clearly copying music to my iPod does not add value and is difficult to monetize. Further distribution in a new form for financial gain is much easier. This is how I understand your argument.

On the other hand, just because no transaction takes place does not mean that value to the work is not being added. For example, a professor copying an article and distributing to a class adds value in terms of enhanced credibility to the work or the author. At the moment, this is not in the control of the author, but rather to whom rights are assigned in the hopes of adding value to a work (e.g. publishers).

What is fuzzy is that in the negotiation of contracts, most authors are quite happy to sign away whole swaths of rights in the hopes that a publisher might just flow back some royalty payments.

In this regard, the concept of added value as a protected moral right would be the only way to avoid the types of abuses that authors and creators often face when leaving it up to others to add value to their works.

At any rate, bravo for putting the discussion on the table. Lets hope the law designers are paying attention.

The value of a work isn’t strictly financial – and frankly depending upon how it’s reused it plays into reputation as well. Hence why Paris weighed in with her political ad (she’s not really a candidate so I can mention her right?)

However, I’m also accepting of people who wish to publish their work anonymously, pseudonymously, or allonymously. Foremost, every “name” is just as much of a pseudonym as any other; none of us is a static being. But more importantly and pragmatically, there are many political pressures (both governmental and corporate) in which we may not want two spheres of our lives to overlap (ala Mark Felt). Anonymity is necessary for precisely the same reasons that the right to bear arms is necessary. (Remember Jim Bell?)

It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you… help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.

The value of a work isn’t strictly financial – and frankly depending upon how it’s reused it plays into reputation as well.

Indeed, attribution seems to point primarily to reputation systems / trust metrics, which I suppose brings us full circle to Cory’s whuffie analogy.

I would think that moral rights in this sense are pretty important to maintain, and that would include naturally attribution.

The problem is that moral rights are difficult to enforce if attribution is given up, but an author could still be found guilty by association through misuse of his work.

c.f. Pseudonymous Software Development and Strong Distribution (PDF)

Any denial of accurate attribution – or attempt to false claims of it is morally bankrupt.

And to my IANAL take it continues that way even if contracts etc add further stipulations on copyright.
Assignments of rights etc or work-for-hire may have granted some defined “rights” to another party. It still does NOT alter that YOU created something. From that fact all else is derived. Or should be. Thus the FACT of attribution should be a no brainer to respect. Then again? Respect is now something of an anathema for much of our present world.

The death of “truth” (always a shaky word) is the cost of instantaneous human interconnection. It’s a globe-trotting game of whisper down the alley at lightspeed, and it comes across as a little immature to try to properly credit something you release into this crazy environment for free. Understandable human reaction, but outdated.

You’d think that with the advent of digital television (ala HDTV) that this would be far more commonplace. Whatever happened to the idea of HDTV including metadata?.. such as hyperlinks so that you can click on a car commercial and go to the car manufacturer’s website, or that you can click an MTV style “popup bubble” about the artist, track title, and a hyperlink to download the MP3 of it.

Supposing somebody fakes my signature on a credit card transaction. They fake it *really* badly — big loops, and an “a” instead of the “e”. Now, I neither want a case to fail against that person because it’s impossible to prove in court that it was in any way an accurate copy of my signature, *nor* does society want me to have some special property right in my name that forbids anyone from using it without my permission, even when they misspell it, or it’s clearly referring to another “Danny O’Brian”

What we want is a law that revolves around the *intent* and aim of that fraudulent act. The part of it connected with “copying” is really irrelevant to the aim. We’ve been misled into making IP bear a lot of this burden, because copying of some kind has always been a contingent part of the fraudulent act (or most successful frauds anyway). But now, copying is a contingent act of almost *everything* in the digital world. There’s no advantage to hoiking fraud cases into IP in the hope of getting a brighter line in law.

We need to call them for what they are: fraud, and stop getting distracted with copying part.

Making money in the future is why attribution counts, and there doesn’t have to be an expectation to “make millions”, making a living is good enough. Consumers may not care who does what but the people who commission artists and designers do, and if someone runs across a free copy of your work you want to be attributed in case they’d like to commission (ie: pay) you to do something new.

One use of copying where I wouldn’t expect attribution is when people have used something of mine for a tattoo; if you want to permanently etch my work on your skin, be my guest.

This makes me wonder about all the unattributed creativity that abounds on anonymous image boards.

I also wonder who didn’t ask for attribution. It was probably a mistake in every case, either of comprehension or of consequence.

There was a Masked Magician who revealed a bunch of mediocre tricks on FOX one day, and, surprise, eventually found the need to “unmask” in another ratings grab. And one day, he approached Penn Jillette at a party, with a woman in tow, and asked Penn to verify for the woman that he was the Masked Magician. Penn started reciting names of celebrities: “David Letterman. Doug Henning. Nelson Mandela. Carl Sagan. Lou Reed. Rudy Giuliani. Dick Clark. Do you know who these people are?”

“Yes”, replied the magician.

“What do they have in common?”

“I’m not sure…”

“PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THEM BECAUSE THEY DON’T WEAR A MASK WHILE THEY’RE GETTING FAMOUS!” Penn then turned to the woman and added, “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.”

P.S. I still don’t remember the masked magician’s name, nor do I remember the exact list of names Penn gave when he told this story on the radio.

[On reading my draft of this it occurred to me that it might come across as something of a poke in the chest rather than the honest and friendly query that I can assure you it is. Mindful of how plain text can be interpreted or misinterpreted, please be assured that I wouldn't want you for a minute to take it the wrong way. - SJB]

Does this mean that you are taking a more sympathetic view of the concept of moral rights? When we spoke after the panel at Eastercon this year you seemed rather dismissive of them, citing the relative success of the US’s economic-based approach to rights over the French approach centring on droit d’auteur. But the right to attribution is one of the most central moral rights.

For my part, whilst I feel that the argument for lengthy post-death copyright for authors is pretty weak, I think there may be a case for providing a longer-lasting moral right against false attribution. It at least provides a weapon against blatant ripping-off of recently-deceased writers. Alas, I think we’re stuck with death-plus-seventy for both as part of the one-size-fits-all approach to copyright that is part of the system so broken as to lead William Patry to despair of blogging about it.