When The Soul of Creativity was published nearly ten years ago, the role of human rights in Intellectual Property law was a relatively uncharted territory, and this is still essentially the case. It is also still the case that moral rights laws in the United States are relatively weak compared to the vast majority of other nations, and the 2019 Report of the Register of Copyrights does little to change our current reality. Although the Report contained some useful recommendations, it did not recommend broadening the scope of moral rights to include a wider variety of subject matter and also declined to revisit the exclusion of the work for hire doctrine to the current application of the Visual Artists Rights Act.
The history of the International Bill of Human Rights demonstrates that, although there may not have been a universal consensus as to whether moral rights are human rights, there was a significant recognition that these interests are deemed worthy of protection in a human rights framework. Therefore, rather than focusing on whether moral rights are within the scope of human rights, the better question is whether the widespread recognition of moral rights means they should be considered as “authorship norms.” I argue that we must develop a broader spectrum of theoretical justifications for copyright law than the existing conventional framework that is currently invoked to justify copyright protection in the United States. In other words, it is critical to create a normative culture that recognizes a more fluid view of copyright, allowing for the incorporation of enhanced moral rights in our legal system.