Copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a legal right that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. This is usually only for a limited time. The exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves.

WHAT IS COPYRIGHT?

1

Copyright is the equivalent of copyright in common law countries, such as the United States and Great Britain, from which however it differs in several respects.

Copyright came about with the invention of the printing press and with wider literacy. The English Parliament was concerned about the unregulated copying of books and passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662, which established a register of licensed books and required a copy to be deposited with the Stationers' Company, essentially continuing the licensing of material that had long been in effect.

WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF COPYRIGHT?

Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized. Different cultural attitudes, social organizations, economic models and legal frameworks are seen to account for why copyright emerged in Europe and not, for example, in Asia. In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was generally a lack of any concept of literary property due to the general relations of production, the specific organization of literary production and the role of culture in society.

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In the twentieth century, the advent of reproducers in particular of computers and Internet networks, stole one of the cornerstones at the base of copyright in the classic sense: the cost and the difficulty of reproducing and disseminating works, aspects until then managed by the editors' corporations after a fair compensation or assignment of the rights by the authors. This made it difficult to protect copyright as traditionally understood, and created new spaces for authors.

Technological development and the advent of the Internet

File sharing (exchange and sharing of files) of material protected by copyright, has developed and spread with the imposition of information technology and the web, in particular thanks to the peer-to-peer system. The speed of this diffusion and development has made it difficult for international industrial law to update itself with the same readiness. In fact, many international analysts are accusing the presence of non-homogeneously filled regulatory gaps.

FILE SHARING

Copy

left

In 1984, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation developed a copyright-specific mechanism for managing software ownership rights. Using a double sense of English, in which "right" means both "right" and "right", they called this copyleft mechanism: "left" means both "left" and "left", to underline a philosophy opposite to that of copyright. This principle has been widely applied in the field of free software.

CASE OF VIOLATION

In 2008, the heirs of Chet Baker have sued the major record companies (Sony BMG, EMI Music, Universal Music and Warner Music) for copyright infringement. Shortly after, other artists were added to them until they reached a class action. The record companies commercially exploited the songs without paying the rights to the authors simply stating that it was not possible to trace them, even the likes of Bruce Springsteen.

• Raffaela Papa
• Sonia De Matteo
• Mario Cicchella
• Rita Masella
• Daniela Sivo
• Giovanna Della Morte