The Moment of Authorship

“Moral rights” protect the personal interests that artists have in their works, independently of any economic rights they may have in them. These include the right to be named as authors of their works and the right to not have their works modified without their permission. My aim in this paper is to clarify the authorship relation that grounds these rights. As commonly understood, to be an author of an artwork is to be one who is responsible for creating it. Recently, however, K. E. Gover has argued that to make sense of the authorship relation that grounds moral rights, we need to recognize that artists must not only create their artworks, but also endorse them as their own creation. Against Gover, I argue that artists’ creation of artworks is sufficient for authorship. I present two arguments against Gover’s claim that authorship requires artists’ endorsement of their works: that it is not reflected in our practices of attributing authors to artworks, and that it does not have any role in explaining the grounds of moral rights. I then discuss some positive reasons why artists’ creation of artworks should be sufficient for authorship that concern the collective interests we have in attributing authors to artworks.