A copyright consists of several separate rights, which are either economic or moral. The economic rights are created through different types of exclusive rights to the created work, and the moral rights protect the authors personality and name.
The original author has an exclusive right to produce copies of his work. This right is not restricted solely to the form in which the author originally has created the work. Accordingly, producing copies by changing, translating or modifying, into another form of literature or art or by using another manner, also belongs to the author's exclusive right. This means for example that a photo of a painting is a protected copy of the original painting.
The right to make copies of a work available to the public is only given to the original author. The different ways of making available to the public are as follows: public performing of the work, distributing copies to the public and public exhibiting of the work. The public performing is applicable first of all to compositions, plays and movies. Only public performing is restricted by the author's exclusive right, and accordingly no admission is required to perform a work to a non-public audience. As a main rule, a performance is public when the audience is not determined beforehand. Further, in order for a performance to be considered non-public it is usually required that the audience is quite small. Distributing copies to the public can take place by having copies of the work placed for sale, leased, loaned or otherwise distributed to the public. As the distributing is, however, usually connected to producing copies of the work, it is often a secondary right. Public exhibition applies first of all to pictorial works.
Two types of moral rights are recognised in Finnish copyright law. The first is the right whereby an author is entitled to have his name stated in connection with his work. The obligation to state the name does not depend on in what extent the work is being made available to the public, as the general rule is that the name of the author should always be stated. The name shall be stated to the extent and in the manner required by proper usage. There are, however, a few exemptions to this rule, but they mainly concern situations where an announcing of a name would be difficult or uncustomary. If an author wishes to remain unknown, the name may not be stated.
The second moral right is the author's right to be respected, i.e. the author's right to prohibit such changing and publishing of his work which is prejudicial to the author's literary or artistic reputation or to his individuality. Further a work may not be made available to the public in such form or in such content that it would prejudice the author in the stated manner. An example of such behaviour is to translate a play badly and then perform it in a way which offends the original play.
The so called protection of classic works is a complement to the moral rights. If a literary or artistic work is used, after the death of an author, in a manner which violates cultural interests, such activities may be forbidden. The right exists even if the copyright is no longer in force or if the copyright never existed.
Amendments to the Copyright Act in 1995 brought two new, internationally common types of rights for authors to the scope of Finnish copyright legislation. The first is the so called "droit de suite", i.e. the main feature being an author's right to get compensation when specific pictorial works of art are sold . The second, the so called "droit d'accŠs" gives an author, as a general rule, a right to access his own pictorial work when this is necessary either for his own work or for him to enforce his economic rights.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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8 May 1997