with no lovin' in our souls, and no money in our coats...

Jim Dedman briefly comments on the topic of the paper I'm writing for my Media Law course. There are certainly a lot of legal theories implicated in the question of moral rights for artists in the United States, from copyright, trademarks, and unfair competition, to defamation, contracts, and free speech. I say "in the United States" only because most civil law countries (most notably, France) already recognize moral rights for artists of all kinds, including film directors. In the U.S., the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) recognizes something akin to moral rights for artists, but only for "work[s] of visual art", a term defined in the Act to mean either a unique work or part of a limited edition (200 copies or fewer) that has been "signed and consecutively numbered by the author". Hence, film directors are explicitly excluded from the protections of VARA.