A 1928 treaty revision put an author's name into international law

The image

The document is Article 6bis of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, reproduced in its currently operative Paris Act text at Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. The provision is three short numbered paragraphs, not a lengthy statute, addressing what the Convention calls the author's moral rights: the right to claim authorship and to object to distortion or modification of a work that would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation, independent of the author's economic rights and surviving even after those economic rights are transferred to someone else.

What the documents show

The treaty text itself states that these rights are 'independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights,' that they continue after the author's death 'at least until the expiry of the economic rights,' exercisable by whoever domestic legislation authorizes, and that 'the means of redress for safeguarding the rights granted by this Article shall be governed by the legislation of the country where protection is claimed.' The U.S. Copyright Office's own circular on international copyright relations separately dates the Convention's revision history, naming a Rome revision of 'June 2, 1928' among the Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm, and Paris revisions that followed the original 1886 text. Treaty commentary generally identifies the Rome revision as the point at which moral-rights language entered the Convention, though this entry's two sources establish the current text and the 1928 revision date separately, rather than the drafting history connecting them in a single document.

Production context

Editorially, the third paragraph's deferral to 'the legislation of the country where protection is claimed' is the operative limit for anyone relying on this article: it creates an internationally recognized right in principle but leaves its enforcement mechanism to each signatory's own domestic law, which is why moral-rights protection for a given production, a director's cut, a cinematographer's credited framing, or a designer's uncredited concept art, varies by country even where Article 6bis nominally applies.

Reference versus imitation

Invoking 'Berne moral rights' as if the treaty itself guarantees a uniform, self-executing attribution remedy overstates what the text supports; the article grants the right in the abstract and hands its 'means of redress' to national law, so a credit dispute crossing borders is a question of which country's implementing statute applies, not of Article 6bis alone. Citing this provision accurately means quoting its actual three paragraphs and naming the domestic law that would enforce them in a given case, rather than treating 'Berne' as a self-sufficient authority.

• Which country's domestic legislation would actually enforce the claimed right?
• Does the right survive the transfer of economic or copyright ownership, as the text specifies?
• Is the claim about the treaty's abstract grant, or about a specific enforceable remedy?

Article 6bis is real, dated, and specific in what it grants; it is not, on its own text, a complete or uniform enforcement system, and a credit or imitation dispute still turns on the domestic law the treaty defers to.