Moral what?

That was my reaction when I saw the term a few weeks ago in one of the email groups I subscribe to. The context was in relation to copyright, so my first reaction was to pull my copy of The Copyright Handbook by Nolo Press off the shelf. If you’re a writer and don’t have The Copyright Handbook in your bookcase, I strongly recommend getting a copy. I learn something new about copyright every time I open the book.

Essentially moral rights are the right to proper credit or attribution whenever your work is published. There’s actually a bit more to moral rights than that, but the post on the email group was how the new owners of the Penny Press magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, Ellery Queen, and Hitchcock’s) appear to be issuing contracts that include having the author waive their moral rights to the work. If you waive those rights, the publisher can do whatever they want with the story and no longer has to acknowledge your ownership. In my mind, that’s not a right you waive or give away.

The post also made me revisit the terms in my original Alfred Hitchcock’s contracts. Nothing in there about moral rights, which I expected, so all good there. The magazine does have the right of first refusal on all Performance Rights, so I need to look at that in more detail.

It goes without saying these developments have caused quite a furore in the author community. Unfortunately, I expect it to be ongoing for quite some time. If writers decline contracts with these clauses, withdraw works under consideration, and stop submitting, what does that say for the future of the magazines?