These laws don't really get into cyberpunks territory, because they are about rights that are reserved to the original artist, and cannot be transferred to publishers or distributors or record companies, and can only be possessed by natural persons, not corporations. So (in France, not the USA) a musician or a film directory might be able to sue Time Warner or Sony if they insist on adding watermarks or copy protection to a work, but neither could sue a cypherpunk for taking the watermarks off. In the USA the moral rights, AFAICT, wouldn't apply to the copy or reproduction anyway, only the original. "Trei, Peter" wrote:

As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was "site specific", and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm

But the important point about that is that the artist lost! According to the website the tried "breach of contract, trademark violations, copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment rights" and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other than to give a few days work to some lawyers. [...]

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic.

Thanks for that - I hadn't heard of VARA before. No real reason I should have I suppose, it being in the USA and me not. It seems much more limited than the French moral rights, in that it only applies to unique objects, not to texts or to broadcast or recorded work. According to the commentary in that paper the US experience with VARA seems to agree with what I have read about the French laws (in books and papers trying to explain them to us English, who never had such rules before), in that few actions are taken under it and that they are almost always relatively unknown sculptors objecting to treatment of a work of public art. With the implication that they are doing it more for the publicity than for the damages, which are either never awarded (in the USA) or are tiny (in France). Ken