International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1932)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

546 the right to exercise it, and how can it be exercised ? The matter, it is obvious, is highly important and delicate, and is connected with the question of authors' moral rights over literary and artistic works in the international field. The Rome conference of 1 928, brought up the question very definitely, while in the revision of the Berne international convention there was introduced into the text revised at Berlin on November 12, 1908 on the proposal of the Italian delegate an article 6 bis which ran as follows : — Independently of the author's property rights, and even after such rights have ceased to exist, the author conserves the right to assert his authorship of the work, and to oppose any deformation, mutilation or other modification of his work which may be prejudicial to his honour or reputation. " The national legislation of the various countries of the Union will have the right of defining the conditions for the exercise of these rights. The means ol invoking the protection of such rights will be determined by the legislation of the country where protection is asked for ". It is clear that the regulation applies to the cinema from the wording of the following article No. 14. The protection of the author's moral rights, while important for all kinds of works, is especially so for the cinema, because the author in assigning the right to adapt or produce a cinematographic work generally divests himself of all his property rights in favour of the producer by means of separate agreements so that from the author's point of view it is only the rule of the moral principle which permits him to take action for the defence of interests which constitute the affirmation of the right of authorship in works. Under the convention, moral rights can only be invoked by the author, and therefore only while the author is alive. No international regulation has yet been enforced concerning the safeguarding of the author's moral rights after his death, either for works still enjoying copyright, or such as have become public property. This is the situation. There exists therefore the possibility of safeguarding in the case of a living author, in the case, that is when such safeguarding of rights is, in the majority of cases, less important. This for the reason that obviously the purchase by a film-producing house of a given work by a living author leads to collaborating agreements and co-operation in the production, in order to avoid possible commercial damage arising from an author officially complaining of the mutilation of his work. The whole point is an extremely controversial one with the commercial heads of the business, for they fear that the recognition of moral rights may lead to actions capable of creating incalculable disturbance in a world as dynamic as that of the cinema. In the Italian juridical sphere, moral rights for works of the mind, which naturally includes cinematographic works, are today more widely recognized than the Rome convention would lead one to suppose. The terms of the Italian law concerning the subject are to be found in articles 13, 14, 15, 16 and 24 of the Royal Decree of November 7, 1925, No. 1950. According to article 16, independently of property rights the author has at any time the right of proclaiming and asserting the paternity of his own work and preventing any modification mutilation or alteration likely to cause grave and unjust prejudice to his moral interests. As a result of the following article, No. 24, " after the author's death, the rights bestowed on him by article 16, can be made use of, without time limit, by the wife or husband of the author and by his children, or failing them, by the author's parents or by other relations in the ascending or descending line, or by the brothers or sisters of the author or their descendants. If no person exists in any of the foregoing categories to defend the author's rights, then action may be taken by the Public Prosecutor As can be seen, according to the Ital an