Author Description

The internet has resulted in an increasingly borderless world. While helping creators to publish and communicate their works to the public at a low cost it has also brought with it serious disadvantages for creators the most important of which related to the fact that their works may be subject to innumerable copyright and moral rights infringements. The often cross-border nature of these infringements means that the conflict of laws may be a crucial question in any resulting legal action. This book considers the intersection between intellectual property and private international law looking in particular at the issue of author’s moral rights. While in recent years, the importance of determining the applicable law to cross-border copyright disputes has received serious attention there has been little corresponding attention paid to moral rights. Currently the applicable choice of law rules for moral rights are the same as those applicable to copyright, despite fundamental differences in their nature and hose interests they aim to protect. This book analyses the both international legal mechanisms including the Berne Convention, the Rome I and II Regulations and the CLIP and ALI Principles, and case law from the UK, France, US and Germany in order to determine whether the existing choice of law rules are appropriate. Hanan Almawla argues that moral rights should be detached from copyright in conflict of laws and sets out how it could instead be attached to the characterization model of general personality rights.