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There are four moral rights that UK copyright law confers:
- The right to be identified as the author of a copyright literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or as director of a copyright film;
- The right not to have one's work subjected to "derogatory treatment" -- amounting to a distortion or mutilation of the work or being otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director;
- The right not to have a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work falsely attributed to oneself as author and not to have a film falsely attributed to oneself as director;
- A right of privacy in respect of certain photographs and films that are commissioned for private and domestic purposes, preventing them from being published, exhibited or shown in public or communicated to the public electronically.
These rights last for as long as the copyright in the relevant works lasts - with the exception of the false attribution right, which only lasts until 20 years after a person's death.
There is no infringement of any of these rights if the person entitled to the right has consented to the act in question or has waived his or her right.
In practice, in many areas of the entertainment industry (including publishing), persons entitled to moral rights are asked to waive them to make sure that the party exploiting the product of the right-owner's services can do so without fear of a claim for moral rights infringement.
This is particularly so in the case of the film and television industry and electronic publishing, where an author's work may be changed considerably in the course of exploiting it.
For example, compare a feature film with the book on which it was based: a film company (and those providing the finance for making the film) could not take the risk of a moral rights claim by the author of the original book, and so the author must waive his or her moral rights in order to sell the film rights. The same would apply to the director of the film.
These are personal rights which cannot be assigned (i.e. sold) during a person's lifetime, but they can be transferred under a person's will.
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