You Do Not Have A Right To Be Credited, Part I

People often think that if they create a work, they automatically have a right to be credited as that work’s author. And people often think that if they reproduce someone else’s work (say by placing a photo in a blog), then the way to comply with copyright law is to give that person credit.

These are misconceptions. In general, there is no rule of law in America that says that authors must be credited for their works. And that has been the state of affairs in the United States and Britain ever since Queen Anne, whose Statute of Anne was enacted in 1710 to protect authors from the printers and booksellers who were publishing and reprinting books without the authors’ permission, to the authors’ “very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families.” This was a statute about giving authors exclusive control over the dissemination of their works, so that printers would have to pay authors for the privilege of publishing books. The idea was that these economic rewards would provide sufficient incentive for authors to write books. And since lofty things like authorial attribution have little to do with hard cash, the Statute of Anne leaves them alone. Copyright law was, and still is to a great degree, concerned with providing economic incentives to creativity: art is a commodity.

Things developed very differently on the European continent, most notably France. There, maybe because writers were the ones making up the law in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the right of attribution is just one of many so-called “moral rights” that authors enjoy. Protection for these non-economic rights is so strong in Europe that someone once got into trouble for placing his business cards next to a collection of art book covers, possibly causing one or two people to mistakenly think that he was the author of those book covers (the one-sentence judgment of France's Cour de Cassation is here).

If you are a creative artist working in the United States, however, all is not lost. In an effort to bring its protection of artistic works into line with international standards, the United States does provide for a right of attribution in the case of certain works of visual art. Also, you can include a provision requiring proper attribution in any license agreements you enter into. I will discuss these possibilities in Part II of this entry.