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If one simply assigns copyright, without a moral rights proviso, it can be assumed that moral rights are relinquished along with the copyright. 

From the IPO website…

"The right to be identified cannot be exercised unless it has been asserted,…”

That is not necessarily the case, and one should not automatically accept as legal writ anything stated by the IPO. The issue here is a lack of legal precedent, and the political dog’s breakfast that is the IPO in its current form. 

Again from the IPO…

"There are a number of situations within which these rights do not apply including…

• where the material is being used in newspapers or magazines”

Again, not so. It is certainly true of writers directly employed by publishers. Employees have no intellectual property rights, but with freelances the situation is different. It helps to assert moral rights explicitly, but legal cases can be made for such rights as implicit. For obvious reasons it is often advisable for freelances to avoid explicitly affirming their IP and moral rights in contractual discussions with commissioning editors.

If a freelance writer assigns copyright to a publisher which then publishes the work under a CC-BY licence, republication of the work with an attribution only to the publisher is acceptable. That is, the author’s moral rights need not be respected. Unless, of course, they are written into the contract between the writer and publisher.

Francis


On 12 Nov 13, at 13:21, Usher, Oli <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Not so - moral rights cannot be assigned, only waived. It’s quite possible to assign copyright (including to an organisation which will then publish under CC-by) without surrendering your moral rights. But this is possibly a moot point as this is arguably news reporting, for which the UK doesn’t recognise moral rights in any case: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-moralrights.htm. (Question: don’t moral rights need to be explicitly asserted in writing in the first place? I certainly never did that when I did freelancing. Does anybody?)
 
Quibbling aside, can anybody explain to me what *practical* difference there is between a freelance contributor CC-by licensing their work, and them assigning it to an organisation which CC-by licenses it? I can see there is a difference in procedure, and I know some people get very het up about it, but I genuinely don’t get why it’s such a big deal.
 
Oli

-- 
Dr Francis Sedgemore
journalist, writer and physicist
telephone: +44 7840 191336
website: sedgemore.com

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