Authors’ Moral Rights in the Digital Environment

Objective: to answer the question whether the authors’ moral rights the in the digital environment correspond to their original purpose, and to determine the impact of the development of social networking platforms, artificial intelligence technologies and non-fungible tokens (NFT) on the transformed role and features of the protection of the author’s moral rights under modern conditions. Methods: the research is based on historical-legal, comparative-legal and formal-dogmatic methods. Legal institutions and legal practice on the issue of protection of the author’s moral rights are subjected to critical analysis. Results: the genesis and normative fixation of the author’s moral rights are investigated in historical retrospect. It is noted that at present the protection of these rights is insufficiently regulated at the international level, while national copyright law, for example, of continental European states, provides a sufficiently strong protection of the author’s moral rights; however, the effectiveness of the latter is weakening in the digital age. The paper analyzes the changing landscape of copyright relations caused by technological progress: in social networks, in the generation of works by artificial intelligence, and in the creation of digital works of art. The thesis is substantiated that the author’s moral rights are undesirable in the context of social platforms. The paper proposes solutions to the issues of authorship of works created by artificial intelligence, violation of author’s rights, and integrity in case of full or partial borrowing of a work to generate a new work by artificial intelligence. The role of NFT technologies in solving the problem of preserving the author’s moral rights is defined. Scientific novelty: the work fills a gap in research on the relationship between copyright and technological development. It identifies and evaluates the innovations in the purpose and content of the author’s moral rights, caused by the processes of digitalization, and attempts to solve the problem of the author’s rights compliance with technological progress. Practical significance: the obtained results may serve as a conceptual basis for further development and improvement of national legislation and international legal regulation in the field of copyright protection, transformation of the objectives, role and place of the author’s moral rights in the digital environment.