Copyright, from criminalisation to normative efficacy

An article by Simone Aliprandi and published in Ciberspazio e diritto, 2012, Vol. 13, n. 45 (2-2012), pp. 147-166.

Abstract
Copyright is one of those branches of law that, thanks to the advent of new digital technologies and the Internet, have gone in a few years from being a just for experts niche to a topic for the general public.
We all have become, willy-nilly, part of the great game of sharing information and creative content. This concept, that seems quite established to most of the people, is not so accepted by some people taking part in this game who prefer to continue playing as if the rules and the playing field were the same as they were before the digital revolution.
This leads to a sort of neurasthenia of the legal system and to many cases of discrepancy between norms and concrete regulation, both from a lawmaking perspective and from a simple reflection of legal-sociological deserve to be taken into account. Users criminalization, exaggerations in the criminal prosecution of sharing behaviors (even the most harmless and commons), dissemination of deliberately distorted information are just some of the elements of this phenomenon.
This article will attempt to provide a socio-legal framework of the main issues arising from the complicated collision between copyright and digital technologies and computer systems, however, taking a cue from the copious literature on the subject and focusing on some of the key aspects of the sociology of law: effectiveness and social perception of law.


[at the moment, the article is available in Italian version only]

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