Moral rights, under Canada’s Copyright Act, are the rights of a work’s author to the integrity of the work and, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with it by name, under a pseudonym, or to remain anonymous — rights that exist separately from copyright itself and cannot be sold or transferred, only waived.
Section 14.1(1) states it directly: “The author of a work has, subject to section 28.2, the right to the integrity of the work and, in connection with an act mentioned in section 3, the right, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with the work as its author by name or under a pseudonym and the right to remain anonymous”. The same section then draws the distinction that separates moral rights from ordinary copyright ownership: “Moral rights may not be assigned but may be waived in whole or in part”, and “An assignment of copyright in a work does not by that act alone constitute a waiver of any moral rights”. A business that pays for and owns the copyright in a work — under an employment contract, or a written assignment from a contractor — does not automatically acquire the individual creator’s moral rights in it. Those stay with the human author unless that author separately waives them.
Moral rights do not disappear on death. Section 14.2 fixes their term at the same length as the copyright in the work, and sets out who they pass to: “the person to whom those rights are specifically bequeathed”, or, failing that, the person who inherits the copyright itself, or failing that, whoever inherits the author’s other property. The Copyright Act contains no AI-specific version of any of this — it was written around a human author, and every one of these rules still runs through that word.
A company commissions a freelance illustrator to draw a mascot, with a written contract assigning copyright to the company under section 13(4). The company now owns the copyright and can licence, modify or sell the artwork. What it cannot do without a separate waiver is alter the mascot in a way that damages the illustrator’s reputation and then credit the original illustrator for the altered version — the integrity and attribution rights are the illustrator’s personally, and the assignment of copyright, on its own, left them untouched.
See also: what is text and data mining, the Copyright Act and AI authorship, is AI output protected by copyright.
Contracts commissioning AI-adjacent creative work — illustration briefs, voice work, training documentation — need to address moral rights explicitly; custom-ai-solutions covers what a build contract should own.
