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Tlhe French system of droit d'auteur (literally translated as "the right of the author") is generally perceived from the outside as a complex and unique set of rules, in particular in the eyes of common law jurists. The particularities of the French system are mostly due to a single factor: the French concept of moral rights.
While moral rights have now been part of most copyright legislations for some time (in the U.S. since the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990), considerable discrepancies exist between the different systems in regard to both the scope and the legal regime of such rights.
The Origins of Moral Rights (DroitMoral)
French copyright law is undoubtedly the legal system which grants the strongest and the broadest protection to moral rights. This is the result of the French evolution of the system of droit d'auteur.
Some legal authors trace the origins of the droit d'auteur and moral rights back to the French Revolution which enshrined the philosophy of individualism The introduction of moral rights is often perceived as an attempt to apply this philosophy to the creation process by securing the bond between the author and his work.
An alternative view is that moral rights emerged in France during the 19th century in the works of the jurist André Morillot (1849-1922). While French courts began acknowledging some isolated elements of moral rights in the early 19th century, Morillot sought to define the nature of the prerogatives accruing to the author by virtue of his creation by introducing a distinction between proprietary rights and extra-proprietary rights. Morillot was the first author to use the term droit moral which later gave birth to the English translation of moral rights.
However, the works of Morillot, like most of the doctrine of moral rights, were based on prior German legal theory and especially on the dualistic approach of German author Rudolf Klostermann, whereby moral rights exist alongside patrimonial rights. Nevertheless, Germany opted for the monist theory (whereby the personal and patrimonial rights are inseparable components of the same right of the author) over the dualistic theory, while the dualistic theory found strong support in France in the early 20th century.
By the end of the first half of the 20th century, the French droit...