Post-Mortem Moral Rights

Jani McCutcheon, University of Western Australian Faculty of Law, is publishing Death Rights: Legal Personal Representatives of Deceased Authors and the Posthumous Exercise of Moral Rights in the Intellectual Property Quarterly. Here is the abstract.

In numerous jurisdictions, moral rights last for many decades after the death of the author, and are exercised by the deceased author’s legal personal representative. This article is the first thorough examination of a plethora of questions and problems concerning post-mortem moral rights and the author’s legal personal representative. The article considers the identity of the author’s legal personal representative (LPR), the scope of their duties and powers when exercising the author’s moral rights, and how any dereliction of duty can be challenged. It then explores the problem of “orphan” moral rights, caused by their posthumous longevity, the difficulty of identifying the author, the LPR and the author’s works, and of understanding the deceased author’s views and the scope of the moral right. The problems identified in the article threaten to negate the efficacy of post-mortem moral rights. The article analyses these problems, and recommends reforms designed to ameliorate them and enhance the effectiveness of post-mortem moral rights.

The full text is not available from SSRN.