ABC obtained a license (via BBC) to broadcast three back-to-back,
30-minute episodes of Monty Python. The contract between Monty Python
and BBC specified that the episodes were only to be braodcast in their
entirety. ABC planned to edit out 6 minutes per half-hour episode,
and Monty Python sued for an injunction to prevent them from broadcasting
the edited version. One basis for this claim was that the deletion
of several scenes from the broadcast violated the moral rights of
the original artists. The court explained: "American copyright
law, as presently written, does not recognize moral rights or provide a
cause of action for their violation, since the law seeks to vindicate the
economic, rather than the personal, rights of authors. Nevertheless, the
economic incentive for artistic and intellectual creation that serves as
the foundation for American copyright law, cannot be reconciled with the
inability of artists to obtain relief for mutilation or misrepresentation
of their work to the public on which the artists are financially dependent.
Thus courts have long granted relief for misrepresentation of an artist's
work by relying on theories outside the statutory law of copyright, such
as contract law or the tort of unfair competition. Although such decisions
are clothed in terms of proprietary right in one's creation, they also
properly vindicate the author's personal right to prevent the presentation
of his work to the public in a distorted form." Since the ABC version
"impaired the integrity of appellants' work and represented to the public
as the product of appellants what was actually a mere caricature of their
talents, the court held that it constituted a violation of Monty Python's
moral rights.