The subject of this article is the criminal law protection of authors’ moral rights
as defined in Article 147 of the Slovenian Criminal Code under the heading
"Violation of moral rights”. Moral rights are those entitlements arising
from the copyright that protect the author in respect of his or her intellectual
and personal ties to the work, which is why these rights are also classified as
personal rights. The Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia provides special
protection to both creativity rights and personality rights. The legislator assessed
that respect for copyright is so important that, in addition to providing
private-law claims, criminal sanctions were prescribed for the most serious
violations of such rights. The Criminal Code criminalises the infringement of
the right to recognition of authorship and the right to integrity of the work,
whereas the violations of moral rights of first publication and of the right to
withdrawal are not criminalised. Infringement of performers’ moral rights is
also not prescribed as a criminal offence. The authors comprehensively analyse
the content of the described incrimination and criticise the disparity between
the terminology used in the Criminal Code and in the Copyright Act, which
leads to unclear definition of the elements of incrimination.
Key words: moral rights, criminal offence, recognition of authorship, right to
integrity of the work, distortion of the work, plagiarism