Adeney, Elizabeth --- "Moral Rights in Canada: An Historical and Comparative View" [2008] ELECD 369; in Gendreau, Ysolde (ed), "An Emerging Intellectual Property Paradigm" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: An Emerging Intellectual Property Paradigm

Editor(s): Gendreau, Ysolde

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847205971

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Moral Rights in Canada: An Historical and Comparative View

Author(s): Adeney, Elizabeth

Number of pages: 34

Extract:

8. Moral rights in Canada: an historical
and comparative view
Elizabeth Adeney*

INTRODUCTION
To a person tracing the development of moral rights in the copyright1 coun-
tries, Canada stands as a forerunner and an example. In 1928, when moral
rights were introduced for the first time into the Berne Convention, it was only
the Canadian legislators who, unlike their counterparts in the UK and
Australia, were prepared to accept that the law then current in Canada, whether
common law or statute, did not render Canada compliant with Article 6 bis of
the new Convention text. While spokespersons in Australia and the UK took
the view that their common law and statute provided sufficient protection for
authorial moral interests2 the Canadian parliament immediately set about
upgrading its legislation. By 1931 the task was accomplished. Canada became
the first of the copyright countries to enact a clear moral rights provision.3



* Some of the matters discussed in the present chapter are pursued in more
detail in Elizabeth Adeney, The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers: an
International and Comparative Analysis (Moral Rights) (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006). English translations in this chapter are the author's unless otherwise
stated. French versions of treaties and legislation are official versions.
1 Namely the countries which have formulated their copyright legislation
according to British models, these models centering on the concept of copyright owner-
ship. Such countries can be contrasted with countries which have taken the concept of
authors' rights as the basis for their ...