Prawo (May 2024)
Przebieg i wyniki prac kodyfikacyjnych w II Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej nad ochroną autorskich praw osobistych, w tym po śmierci twórcy
Abstract
The author first presents the history of the codification of copyright in the Second Republic of Poland, a task entrusted to the Codification Commission and then further work on the Act in the Sejm and the Senate. These resulted in the Act of 29 March 1926 on copyright, based on the dualist theory, according to its original formulation by the main author of the Act, Professor Fryderyk Zoll junior of the Jagiellonian University. In the article, the focus is on the essence of the construction of moral rights in the Polish Act. It is highlighted that it applies the French model, in which the author’s moral right exists in perpetuity, different from the German model, based on the assumption that moral rights expire with the expiration of the author’s economic right (monistic theory). Another important feature of the French model, which was adopted by the Polish legislator, was the inalienability of the author’s moral rights, having in the Germanic model a significant deviation in terms of inheritance law. The premise of the 1926 Copyright Act was also the impossibility of waiving author’s moral rights, although an exception to this was admitted by Frederick Zoll in the doctrine. The position of the Polish Act was thus characterised in this respect as different from the legislation allowing for the waiver of moral rights, which does not result in the divestment of a personal copyright, but only makes it unenforceable. One of the most disputed issues during the work on the Act in the Codification Committee of the Second Republic of Poland, which had its finale in the amendment of the Copyright Act of 1935, was the protection of the author’s moral rights after the author’s death. This is an interesting research problem, all the more so because the Polish projects were pioneering in this respect in the international arena. Against the background of the general concept of moral rights, the author presents the polemics waged by Polish scholars-codifiers on moral rights after the death of the author. He points out the originality of the developed juridical solutions and some of their weaknesses, mainly related to the evolution of views among the codifiers.
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