Origins, Evolution and Comparison of Moral Rights between Civil and Common Law Systems

The protection of moral rights embraces the now widespread personal sphere of copyright and originated much later than the economic exploitation of the work itself. Some of its components can be found in the English and German thought between the 17th and 18th centuries and, starting from the early 19th century, would have a substantial development through the contribution of both the French legal scholarship and case law. The legal foundations, in any case, date back to some codifications of the German area and to the earliest international treaties, making it a discipline that did not take into consideration the extent of the national territory. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relevance of the European models and their influence in Italy after the national Unification, in particular in the first decades of the 1900s. In fact, the international protection of moral rights takes root in Italy during the 1928 Rome Conference for the revision of the 1886 Berne Convention. The United States joined it only later, in 1989, with the Berne Convention Implementation Act (BCIA). Thirty years later, the Copyright Office published in April 2019 an extensive study about the American protection of moral rights. The document is studied in this paper in comparison with the European Directives and with the Copyright Directive definitively approved a few days before the Copyright Office document. While in the USA the interest in moral rights up to now rather limited seems to be increasing, in Europe the protection of moral rights risks being waned as it is handed down to individual countries with the explicit declaration that it is not the subject matter of the Directives.