Revised: 2007-07-12

Moral rights

The important moral rights are the right to object if your work is distorted - to defend its "integrity" - and the right to an accurate credit. These are obviously important to protecting and spreading your reputation - and without your reputation you have no work.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (see the link below) made moral rights explicit for the first time in UK law. The exact rights are:

• the right to be identified as the author of the work;
• the right to object to false attribution of the work; and
• the right to object to "derogatory treatment" of the work - also referred to as the right to protect the integrity of the work.

In plain English, freelances have the rights to a credit; to prevent anyone else claiming authorship; and to protect the authenticity of their work. This last is particularly important now that computer technology makes digital manipulation so easy and so hard to detect.

But there are (of course) exceptions to the above.

• In particular the moral rights to a credit and to object to derogatory treatment do not apply to any work made for the purpose of reporting current events; or for newspapers, magazines and similar periodicals; or appearing in encyclopaedias, dictionaries or yearbooks.
• The right to a credit is effective only if it is "asserted": the phrase "Moral rights asserted" or even "All rights reserved" at the foot of the copy or on invoices seems to be sufficient "assertion".
• Employed journalists have no right to a credit on work done in the course of their employment.
• Employed journalists have no right to defend the integrity of work done in the course of their employment (except in the case that the work is not reporting news or current affairs, does not appear in a newspaper or magazine, and it has appeared with a credit).
• UK law makes it possible for these rights to be given up or "waived" anyway.

Clients using laundry-list contracts often demand that freelances "waive" their moral rights, even where the law already rules them out for the uses that the freelance is licensing. Such pressure needs to be resisted. The point of it, in so far as there is one beyond grabbing everything the lawyer can think of and most things they can not, is to create the impression that waiving moral rights is normal business practice.

Clients sometimes argue that they need a waiver of the moral right of integrity so that they can edit freelances' work. This is a false argument, even without considering the gap in the law for newspapers and magazines (unless the editor intend to change the work so that it is "contrary to the honour or reputation" of the journalist). It is good practice for editors to send the edited version to the journalist to check that the subs have not clarified it to say something that's not true. Email makes it possible to do this even on a daily paper. We suggest that the moral right applies to the integrity of the agreed published version, and allows the journalist to defend that against changes by others.

(Of course in the case of photographs, publishing a picture that has been altered in any way beyond correcting colour balance and so forth is wrong - unless it is clearly labelled as manipulated and therefore an illustration, not reportage. See the NUJ Code of Conduct, linked below.)

And another thing (mostly for picture editors)

Journalists who work as picture editors or who may be asked to collect "pick-up" photographs - for example family photos of someone in the news - need to know about the little-known "fourth moral right". This forbids publishing, broadcasting or exhibiting photos taken for "private domestic" clients, unless the person who "commissioned" them gives permission. It appears to mean that it is illegal to publish a "pick-up" photo unless you have the explicit permission of the person who "commissioned" it as well as the holder of the copyright, and as well as permission to borrow the physical photo.

But remember, you own copyright

Some freelances are confused by our complaints about the exclusion of moral rights in work done for newspapers and magazines. Remember: you own copyright - the economic rights - in every article you write, every design you produce and every picture you take, as a freelance, until and unless you assign it to someone else.

Generally useful links: