A/HRC/28/57 25. To protect authors’ interests in their reputations and the integrity of their creations, copyright laws often impose certain obligations on publishers and other secondary rights holders, which cannot be waived by contract. The scope and breadth of these “moral rights” varies significantly from country to country. The Berne Convention establishes a minimum floor requiring member States to protect certain moral rights of authors, but no particular approach is mandated by the TRIPS Agreement. III. Copyright policy and protection of authorship 26. It is sometimes claimed that intellectual property rights are human rights, or that article 15, paragraph 1 (c), of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes a human right to protection of intellectual property along the lines set out by the TRIPS Agreement and other intellectual property treaties. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has stressed that this equation is false and misleading.9 Some elements of intellectual property protection are indeed required — or at least strongly encouraged — by reference to the right to science and culture. Other elements of contemporary intellectual property laws go beyond what the right to protection of authorship requires, and may even be incompatible with the right to science and culture. 27. Protection of authorship requires States to respect and protect the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, artistic or literary production of which a person is the author. The term “author” has a particular meaning, borrowed by human rights documents from copyright law. “Author” refers to the creator of any work eligible for copyright protection. Thus, writers, painters, photographers, composers, choreographers, storytellers, graphic designers, scholars, bloggers and computer software designers will all be considered as “authors” under copyright law. From the human rights perspective, the term “author” is to be understood as including individuals, groups or communities that have created a work, even where that work may not be protected by copyright. Within both the human rights and the copyright framework, both professional and amateur authors/artists may qualify for recognition as an author. 28. The moral and material interests of authors are deeply affected by copyright policy, which in some ways falls short of adequately protecting authorship. In other ways, copyright laws often go too far, unnecessarily limiting cultural freedom and participation. Unlike copyrights, the human right to protection of authorship is non-transferable, grounded on the concept of human dignity, and may be claimed only by the human creator, “whether man or woman, individual or group of individuals”.10 Even when an author sells their copyright interest to a corporate publisher or distributer, the right to protection of authorship remains with the human author(s) whose creative vision gave expression to the work. 29. The human right to protection of authorship is thus not simply a synonym for, or reference to, copyright protection, but a related concept against which copyright law should be judged. Protection of authorship as a human right requires in some ways more and in other ways less than what is currently found in the copyright laws of most countries. 9 10 General comment No. 17, paras. 1–3. Ibid., para. 7. 7