Are Moral Rights Denied From Servicemen?

In September 2017 the Jerusalem District Court held that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) had no obligation to designate the name of a soldier photographer in publications including photographs taken during a soldier's military service and that assigning credit to the IDF spokesperson alongside the picture is sufficient. Considering the recent trend of Israeli courts to strengthen moral rights of artists, this ruling is particularly interesting because it practically exempted the IDF from the obligation to assign credits to authors.

In Ron Ilan v. Miskal Publishing House¹ the claimant had served as a photographer in the military's photography unit , and the defendants, a book publisher, had published a book that contained pictures taken by the claimant during the Yom Kippur War, without his name being mentioned as the work's author; rather, the publishing company gave general credit to the IDF spokesperson only.