American Authorship and the Ghost of Moral Rights

The history of the author’s moral rights doctrine in the laws of France and the United States opens productive inquiry into the nature of American authorship, the functions of authorship more widely, and ultimately, the direction of print culture studies as a field. Such moral rights have never been a coherent feature of American law, and this “ghost” of moral rights clarifies the difference between American and French intellectual property regimes as they treat authors, as well as reveals the materialist emphasis in most historiography of American authorship itself.