Autori: Paola Stefanelli, Elisabetta Angelini

In the vast universe of the Internet there are multiple opportunities to protect or exploit creative works, be they images or texts, on condition that you don’t fall into inertia, unconscious violations, or naivety.

To protect yourself, it is sufficient that you know the rights and limits that govern the various activities you can do online.

For example, in Italy if we want to protect a photograph, a drawing, a piece of text or music, etc., but at the same time to disseminate it, we can invoke Article 1 of Law No. 633 of April 22, 1941, the Copyright Law, according to which “Works of the mind having a creative character and belonging to literature, music, figurative arts, architecture, theatre or cinematography, whatever their mode or form of expression, shall be protected in accordance with this Law”.

Copyright Law applies to both the pre-Internet and the digital eras, so much so that its core principles (as well as most of the detailed regulations) continue to apply today, mainly to the Web.

Copyright comes into being at the moment the work is created and is entirely owned by the author, unless of course they are creating for a third party under contract.

Precisely by virtue of this full right, authors can do what they want with their work, especially from an economic point of view (including assigning exploitation rights), and the authorship of the work itself will always be attributable to them.

However, it should not be mistakenly assumed that copyright to everything that can be found on the Web and that all online content is subject to restrictions of this kind.

The Internet also encompasses a vast and “free” world, in which three of its macro-components are removed from the constraints of copyright law for very different reasons, due to three legal circumstances: “fair use”, “public domain” and “copyleft”.

– The term “fair use” refers to the circumstances in which a work, although subject to copyright, may be freely reproduced due to special justification (e.g. for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching etc. ).

– The term “public domain” refers to a work that is not bound by the standard limits imposed by copyright law (for reasons of time, i.e. the copyright has expired ,or the author is unknown,  or for other reasons imposed by intellectual property restrictions on the scope of copyright , for instance cooking recipes)

– The term “copyleft” applies to all those works that are not subject to copyright (in an obvious play on words using juxtaposition). In this case, authors have waived their intellectual property rights, deciding to circulate their work freely and/or imposing at most a few restrictions (such as, for example, the requirement to “cite the source”).

Copyleft consists, in essence, of a real licence through which authors give permission for their own work to be copied and reproduced, thus freeing themselves from the fundamental principles of copyright law, according to which the author instead controls the rights of reproduction,  communication  and distribution and the resulting restrictions.

The purpose of copyleft dissemination is primarily to protect social interests in the creation of knowledge and is also fundamental to many programming projects. For example, a user using software subject to a copyleftlicence may modify, copy and distribute the same modified software, offering the recipient users the possibility to make further changes.

In this respect, it is generally held that the first general public licence was created in 1983 by a Richard Stallman to regulate the use of the OPEN SOURCE programming project “GNU”, i.e. a set of tools that can be used with a free software, which can be used both as an operating system and with other operating systems. It has also been speculated that the use of GNU tools enabled and anticipated the launch of the operating systems popularly known as LINUX.

Over the years, however, the concept of the free circulation of creative works has undergone many evolutions. To name but a few, we need only think of the Creative Commons, i.e. actual contracts through which, in a simple and standardised manner, authors communicate which rights they reserve for themselves and which they cede for use by others, by applying the “some rights reserved” model.

The recipients are an indefinite number of people to whom, if desired, copyright can be assigned, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, according to the principle of free choice.

To cite a significant example, “Creative Commons Music” is the best known organisation in its field that makes thousands of video tracks, articles, books and music available to users in an online, non-profit audio-library.

Many consider copyleft to be a form of regression and a limitation of the grand concept of “true” intellectual property, which was created precisely to protect something intangible that “belongs” to someone.

On a deeper level, we might instead realise that copyleft treats creative works as common assets and can undoubtedly be considered, in its broadest form, a “bridging mechanism” whose main purpose is to encourage the growth of social knowledge and the common good.