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American Moral Rights And Fixing The Dastar Gap, Justin Hughes

Faculty Articles

When the United States acceded to the Berne Convention in 1988, Congress concluded that a compendium of causes of action under American law, including Lanham Act claims, provided the moral rights protections mandated by Berne Article 6bis. This claim of patchwork protection of moral rights has always been widely criticized, but became more dubious in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. In Dastar, the Court held that vis-a-vis works in the public domain there is no Lanham section 43(a) obligation to credit the original creator or copyright owner as the origin of …