INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL
«GLOBAL SCIENCE AND INNOVATIONS 2023: CENTRAL ASIA»
ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN, APRIL 2023
94
FEATURES OF THE MONISTIC AND DUALISTIC THEORY OF COPYRIGHT
Khauiya Saulet
M.S. Narikbayev KAZGUU University
Astana, Kazakhstan
Distinction between moral right and economic right has its root in the development of two
important theories: the dualist theory and the monistic theory[1, p.17]. The former was developed
in France and the latter in Germany. The dualist theory holds that an author’s moral right is rooted
in his personality quite independently of his proprietary interests. As such, the dualist theory
divides the whole set of prerogatives arising from copyright into two categories of rights –the
moral right and the economic right. This separation is based on the fact that they serve different
interest and objective which can be separately identified. The droit moral or moral faculties are
perpetual, inalienable and imprescriptible whereas the economic
faculties are limited in time,
alienable and submitted to prescription. According to this theory, moral rights are chronologically
and systematically primordial: they precede the real existence of economic rights and also last
longer than the latter. If the economic prerogatives secure the authors a share in the income from
work exploitation, droit moral and its prerogatives secure protection for the personal, intellectual
and spiritual interests of authors. In view of their importance in modern society,
moral rights
cannot be signed away.
In contrast, the monistic, or unitary, theory holds copyright itself to include an inalienable
moral aspect. Hence, it regards all the prerogatives belonging to the author,
both personal and
pecuniary, as expression of a unitary right which guarantees, as a whole, both the intellectual and
economic interest of the author. In short, it is copyright as a whole which serves to protect
intellectual and moral as well as economic interests of authors. This is most vividly illustrated in
Prof. Ulmer’s ‘copyright tree’ where the roots of the tree represent moral and economic interests
of the author, and the stem represents the unitary and integrated copyright as a whole. The branches
and shoots growing from the stem represent the different faculties (legal prerogatives) which, like
the
branches on the stem, at times derive their force from both roots – the personal and the
economic – and at others, draw more heavily on one of them[2, p.118].
Accordingly, the proponents of monistic theory hold that the exercise of moral rights can
serve financial interests while the exercise of pecuniary rights can serve personal and intellectual
interests. For example, the exercise of the right of attribution has important economic dimension
in that it is only when his name is correlated with his work, his talent become known in the market.
Attribution of his name in this case serves to procure new business to him. Similarly, the exercise
of integrity right may also serve the material interest of the author particularly under such
circumstances where distortion or mutilation of the work damages its potential market.
In contrast, when a successful entrepreneur would write and publish his biography or
business success story profit motive will probably be only of secondary importance. In this case
he exercises his economic right primarily to serve his moral interest: “to
fulfill his personal
interests of self-realization and perhaps also of vanity” (Ibid.) These examples clearly illustrate
that “what is commonly called moral right or moral rights, on the one hand, and pecuniary right or
pecuniary rights, on the other hand, is not so unequivocally moral or economic as it would
generally appear.” These designations, according to Bodhi: are “rather
based on terminologic
convenience; only taken together all these faculties (legal prerogatives) cover the whole spectrum
of interests protected by copyright as a whole”(Ibid). He maintains that the so-called dualistic
interpretation of copyright in French theory is not as dualistic as one would have thought. This is
so because droit moral is understood more in the sense of a bundle of special faculties within the
unitary copyright than as a compact and separated concept of copyright[3, p.85].