The French Model and the Development of Authors’ Rights

The author reviews a few trends that outline authors’ rights connected with the 2008 draft review of the second book of the French Civil Code. The draft brings to the fore some aspects that had been identified in the past and yet never solved. Although excluded from the Civil Code and governed by special legislation, the French model took root first in some European and afterwards Central and Latin American codifications due to its importance and novelty. Still today some codes in force in Civil Law countries include the principle of authors' rights protection and refer the detailed regulation to the special law. More recently, certain examples have come to place the protection principle in the context of the safeguard of civil rights. Other countries, namely France, but also Germany and Brazil, protect such rights exclusively in special laws, leaving open the issue of the relationship between codification and intellectual property created by the Napoleonic Civil Code.