Naming Rights: Attribution and Law

Attribution remains a powerful incentive for creative production. Moreover, norms of credit, including the ones that produced all the footnotes in this piece, are extremely valuable for particular professions and individuals laboring within those professions. Sometimes, however, law and morality should be left to diverge, when law's tools are too crude to make the fine distinctions that prevail in ethics. Attribution rights provide an example of this situation.

"Who steals my purse steals trash, but should still go to jail; but he that filches from me credit for my creative works deserves condemnation, not injunction.