CONTEXTS

Applied TheoryMcKee and Porterwith fair practice, and their extent doesnot exceed that justified by the purpose,including quotations from newspaperarticles and periodicals in the form ofpress summaries. (World IntellectualProperty Organization, 1979, Article 10)However, the Berne Convention also recognizes theprinciple of the author’s moral rights to claim ownershipover a work, even if those rights have been transferred:(1) Independently of the author’seconomic rights, and even after thetransfer of the said rights, the authorshall have the right to claim authorship ofthe work and to object to any distortion,mutilation or other modification of, orother derogatory action in relation to, thesaid work, which would be prejudicial tohis honor or reputation. (Article 6 bis )Building on Berne, other agreements have arisen,including the Trade-Related Aspects of IntellectualProperty Rights agreement (TRIPS) (World TradeOrganization, 1994). Because of the TRIPS agreement,all WTO member states now have a set of minimumstandards regarding international intellectual property.According to Yu (2008), the TRIPS agreement is“a universal template for modernizing intellectualproperty systems” (p. 932). That said, Yu is careful topoint out that the agreement primarily represents theinterests of powerful WTO member states and doesnot itself fully address “the challenges confrontingless developed countries and … the local conditions inthese countries” (p. 939). Also problematic is the factthat implementing international agreements requires awell-developed judicial system to review cases and thepolitical will to back up such an effort. Many countrieshave neither. Still, from the point of view of research,such agreements can serve as international benchmarksto guide ethical decision making. From these and otherstatements of law and principle, what has emerged overtime is something close to a global consensus regardingcopyright.Fitzgerald and O’Brien (2006) described thisconsensus: “Moral rights [for example, the right ofattribution, to be credited for the work, and the rightto preserve the integrity of the work] stay with thecreator or author. Economic rights [the right to controlreproduction and communication to the public] gowith the copyright owner” (p. 224). Fundamental tomoral rights for authors are, first, the moral right ofattribution: Content creators should be credited for theirintellectual property. (See Lastowka, 2007). Second is theright to preserve the integrity of the work: The contentshould not be skewed, misrepresented, or changed ina way that dramatically changes the original intent orthat violates the author’s integrity. (As we have pointedout, these moral rights for authors have a stronger legaltradition in Europe than in the United States. However,in U.S. Copyright Law, section 106a, added in 1990, doesgrant authors of works of visual art rights of attributionand integrity.Some have criticized these international standardsfor being far too influenced by copyright legislationrecently enacted by the U.S. Congress that expands therights of copyright owners at the expense of the publicinterest (see Harmonizing Copyright’s, 2008; Reichman,Dinwoodie, & Samuelson, 2007). Doreen Starke-Meyerring (2005) argues that “globalizing processes aredominated by corporate neoliberal interests in the removalof government regulations from global markets throughsuch organizations as the WTO, the IMF [InternationalMonetary Fund], and the World Bank” (p. 485).Despite these debates, an international standard isemerging that is fundamentally a human rights approachto intellectual property and a view of intellectualproperty that affords moral rights to the author strongerthan those recognized in U.S. copyright law. Technicalcommunicators doing Internet-based research shouldstay up to date on these developments.The Complexity of Copying Digital Materials:One ExampleOften it is in the specifics of an example that thecomplexities of intellectual property law are mostevident. To that end, we ask you to imagine that we—Heidi and Jim—are technical communicators workingfor a software company. We have been asked by ouremployer to study other companies’ user help forumsand help-related social networking sites to determineVolume 57, Number 3, August 2010 l Technical Communication 293