The original "vice" of ©
As is known, it was Queen Anne of England, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who invented copyright to get rid of the begging of actors and artists of all stripes who asked for the government handout, sure of contributing madly to the glory of nation. The modern cultural industry, one of the most flourishing and admired on the planet, revolves around this rather prosaic original mood, modulated on the thought "get out of the p***e". Looking closely, this original mood has remained alive in some areas of Western society that see copyright as something that hinders the development of knowledge and human growth in the age of dematerialized and easily shareable content.
Americans and Europeans are very similar, have essentially the same koine and share a common system of values and references. However, there are many areas of divergent vision between the two sides of the Atlantic. The 12 European monarchies make Americans smile and Europeans smile back about the country music and food styles of Americans. The first amendment to the American constitution establishes the primacy of freedom of expression, if there were a first amendment in Europe it would concern privacy. Freedom of expression and privacy are a pair always on the verge of divorce and usually it is the interest that keeps them together. This different scale of values has given rise to several tensions between the two sides of the Atlantic.
One area of divergence concerns copyright especially after Napster and above all web 2.0 hit the culture industry like a large meteorite hitting a planet without an atmosphere. After this impact, stated in rather brutal but substantially correct terms, it goes like this: for Europeans copyright is the space shield that defends the continent's artists and creatives, for Americans it is something that hinders business development. So the two geographical and economic areas, in harmony on many things, tend to move in substantially divergent directions, the first tending to increasingly regulate and the second to lighten.
© cold war?
On the matter of copyright, quite strategic questions are gathering in US-EU relations and a historian of transatlantic relations such as Peter Baldwin, professor of history at UCLA, has dedicated a specific 600-page study to this topic with the significant title The Copyright Wars: Three Decades of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton University Press, 2014). Baldwin's book starts from the observation that what was a different approach that was peacefully applied in national laws has degenerated into a kind of war with the advent of the Internet and its corollaries which are the objective supranationality of the diffusion of content, imperialism of the young companies in Silicon Valley and the backwardness of Europe which has not been able to do with IT what it has done in other fields such as the aeronautical, automotive, mechanical, food, fashion industries and so on.
The Europeans, who are subjected to the initiative of the Americans in terms of innovation and business and consumption models, have made copyright, as mentioned above, a protective spatial shield of their cultural tradition and of the entertainment industry. Right too, if we hadn't reached paranoia: soon in some European countries the right to quote will also disappear, which can easily be incorporated into the concept of ancillary copyright which is already law in Germany and Spain. It may happen that quoting a passage, even in a scientific work, will only be possible with the explicit consent of the right holder once the just compensation clause has been satisfied.
The © is the new star of the European flag. In truth, a certain obstinacy on copyright by the legislators of continental Europe has little to do with copyright itself, as much as it is related to the need to protect European media and related businesses from the disruptive action of multinationals global Americans who tend, without extra-market interventions, to pulverize the activities they encounter. Disruption, so fashionable across the Atlantic, is non grata activity in Europe.
Civil law and common law
Peter Baldwin, in his substantial The Copyright Wars, offers an interesting insight into the subject of intellectual property, comparing European legislation with the Anglo-Saxon one and hoping for the renewal of anachronistic and excessively restrictive laws, which do not reflect the challenges posed by technological development and since the advent of digital media.
Copyright laws, which arose in Europe around the 1865th century, give authors the power to allow their works to be reproduced or to claim compensation if they are exploited for commercial purposes without the consent of the owner. intellectual property, a more recently coined term. It is mentioned in a document of the Georgofili Academy of XNUMX.
These rights, which originally expired with the death of the authors, were later extended to their heirs, taking two distinct forms in countries characterized by civil law and common law. In the first case, ie in continental Europe, the law better protects the interests of authors, while in Anglo-Saxon countries fair use allows for the reproduction of intellectual works in a more free way for educational, scientific and even commercial purposes. Fair use, for example, is the pillar that holds up Google and, above all, the hypertext link which is the web's nervous system.
Beyond moral rights?
Despite the subtle differences between the two legislations, the exponential development of technology has placed the whole world in front of the need to fill the regulatory vacuum that has been created, during the XNUMXth century, around the Anglo-Saxon concept of "copyright" and the European one of "copyright". The ease with which it is possible to share all types of content on the Internet today (particularly through systems such as file sharing and peer-to-peer) has deprived the traditional media industry of those means which for centuries had allowed it to control the market, forcing new authors to seek alternative ways to make themselves known to the general public quickly and cheaply. An emblematic example, in this sense, is that of the recording industry, which has been greatly affected by the expansion of the web, no longer being able to offer the public original material at competitive prices.
Furthermore, on an ethical level, the fact that the rights of economic exploitation last for an unlimited time is questionable, when intellectual works should more fairly belong to the whole of society. Finally, even with the aim of guaranteeing the correct transmission of intellectual works, the absolute value that the European legal system attributes to moral rights seems to prevent emerging authors from developing the great artistic heritages in a new and original way, appropriate to the times
