Copyright Law

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Moral Right – English Copyright Law
For over a century, the United Kingdom (UK) has passed and amended a series of laws regarding copyright. The UK law perceives copyright as an intangible object whose concept originated from the Common law. According to the UK Copyrights Service, the law grants creators of “literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, sound recordings, broadcasts, films, and typographical arrangement of published editors, rights to control the ways in which their material may be used (1).” Copyright in the UK is regarded as automatic rights, in that, it immediately applies upon creation; without any need to register the original works (Digitisation and Conservation: Overview of Copyright and Moral Rights in UK Law). Copyright sets forth two types of rights, i.e., economic rights to initial owner and moral rights.
According to Tanya Aplin and Jennifer Davis, moral rights are rights that “inhere in the author of copyright works regardless of whether they retain ownership of the economic rights (Aplin and Davis 163).” They, therefore, protect an author’s personal interests in the copyrighted work. Moral rights originated primarily from European countries with civil laws such as Germany and the UK and quickly spread to the rest of the world (Aplin and Davis 163). The term moral right was drawn from the French term ‘droit moral’ which implies peculiar interests as was understood across Europe. This, …