4 - Moral Rights and the Cultural Aspects of Hungarian Copyright Law:

Summary

From the legal historian’s point of view, we can say that economy and society “shape” law, or that law “influences” economy and society, or that law and economy and society are all “mutually constitutive.”² These assertions particularly apply to the examination of moral rights in the legal history of copyright law in Hungary and, more generally, in other Central and Eastern European countries. These countries are unique in that they share a socialist period in their history, which points to an interesting connection between the moral rights of authors and the struggle to overcome political repression. As Sundara Rajan has pointed out, with bitter irony, the ideological aspects of socialism imbued all human expression with powerful political connotations.³