As I have pointed out previously, IP rights such as copyright and patent in effect grant the holder the right to control the property and bodies of other people (see p. 44 of this article; p. 862 of this article). This is illustrated by the case of Samuel Beckett and his 1953 play “Waiting for Godot” (discussed and parodied in Waiting for Opradot, by PatNews‘s Gregory Aharonian). As Aharonian points out,

Beckett denied women the opporunity to act in productions of Waiting For Godot, because “they don’t have prostates”, a request the Beckett estate has enforced using the moral rights clauses of copyright laws. For example, in 1992, a French court convicted a director of violating Beckett’s moral right by staging Waiting for Godot with two women as the leads, contrary to Beckett’s stage directions.

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