THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SIMPLE AND ARTISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY

Recently the Court of Milan has again expressed itself on the notion of artistic and simple photographs.

The case was brought by a photographer alleging the infringement of the copyright of a photograph entitled "Human Feelings as Drugs", consisting of the production of photographs, prints and posters reproducing medicine vials in various colors, bearing emotional labels "Empathy", "Hope", "Love", "Peace" and "Joy". The artist intended to spread a message of ​​taking "feelings as medicines", so as to "allow the patient an instant reawakening of perception and a reintegration within the vital flow of emotions".

Plaintiff complained an illegal reproduction of his photograph through a series of pendants - matched with necklaces and bracelets - that would have reproduced their own phials, with identical words reproduced on the labels and asked for an injunction, the award of damages and publication of the decision.

The Court stated that in the matter of photographic works, the artistic character presupposes the existence of a creative act as an expression of an intellectual activity compared to the mere material technique. The reproduction of the photographer must transmit a message that is further and different from the objective crystallized representation, consisting in a subjective interpretation suitable to distinguish a work among other analogous ones having the same representation. The requirement of the creativity of the photographic work exists whenever the author has not limited himself to a reproduction of reality, but has inserted into the picture his own imagination, taste, and sensitivity, so as to transmit his emotions.

With respect to photography, the artistic nature of reproduction can be inferred regardless of the subject reproduced.

In the case under examination, the Court has excluded the artistic nature of the images, since it is impossible to recognize precisely those aspects of originality and creativity that are necessary for recognizing full protection under Italian Copyright Law. Plaintiff did not indicate the manner in which the photograph was shot or a selection of lights or even specific doses of light and dark tones.

The Court also dwelt on the further infringement of copyright as an overall artistic work excluding the plagiarism of the defendant as it found that the comparison between the two works highlighted certain important differences between the two artistic works.

THE FIRST ROUND OF THE BATTLE DIESEL/ZARA GOES TO...

Otb, the group founded by Renzo Rosso, which includes brands such as Diesel, Maison Margiela and Marni, recently won a judgment before the Milan court against the Inditex group that controls the well-known Zara brand. The company founded by Renzo Rosso has seen to welcome from the Court of Milan its arguments sustained in the case started in 2015 against the Spanish company, accused of having reproduced with the Zara brand of jeans produced by Diesel and sandals designed by Marni.

Although the Iberian group supported the existence of substantial differences between its own products and those of Otb, claiming the impossibility of the Court award damages being a foreign company without headquarters in Italy, the judges decreed violation of the registered design of the Skinzee-sp jeans model and the unregistered design of the Fussbett footwear.

It is not the first time that the Iberian group is involved in such accusations. Just over a year ago, the Danish "Rains" label specializing in rainwear has brought a lawsuit to Inditex in front of the Danish Commercial Court for breach of design and unfair competition by requesting the immediate termination of the sales of an allegedly infringing model and the compensation for damages for the loss of the corresponding profits.

The Point on the EU's Copyright Reform

The European Union is working on reforming the copyright by forcing websites to enable “upload filters” and to pay for linking to other websites.

One of the biggest issues with the new EU copyright reform proposal is the Article 13, which mandates that websites that accept user content (anything from videos to online comments) must have an “upload filter” that would block all copyrighted content that's uploaded by users. Critics, such as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Julia Reda, have also called upload filters “censorship machines.”

Under the censorship machine proposal, companies would be required to get a license for any copyrighted content that is uploaded to their site by its users. In other words, websites would be liable for any content their users upload to the site.

Some argue that upload filters wouldn’t be able to recognize “legal uses” of copyrighted content, even if they were 100% effective in identifying whether or not a piece of content is copyrighted or not. In this category would enter parodies and citations, which typically make references to licit copyrighted content.

It is disputed if uploading filters is legal or if it violates fundamental rights to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom to conduct a business.

Another article under dispute is the so called “link tax” proposal in Article 11 of the copyright reform directive is another idea that’s not just seemingly bad, but it has also failed in countries such as Spain and Germany, where it has already been attempted. Instead of getting companies such as Google or other publishers to pay for the links, or article excerpts and previews, those companies simply stopped linking to content coming from Germany and Spain.

Critics believe that a link tax would significantly reduce the number of hyperlinks we see on the web, which means websites will be much less connected to each other.

These two articles seem to be the most controversial by far and critics believe that the directive would probably have a negative impact on companies

THE PROTECTION OF BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS

Can we freely write, publish or tell the lives of famous people?

On this point the Court of Milan (IP Section) recently rendered a descision to settle a dispute between two authors (Antonio Prestigiacomo and Marcello Sorgi) on the life of the Sicilian Prince Raimondo Lanza di Trabia, the man who invented the soccer transfer market and who was Rita Hayworth's lover and a close friend of Onassis.

The Court ruled that in the case of biographical works of well-known personalities, the facts and events that affected them belong to the common patrimony and are not autonomously monopolizable by anyone. Copyright protection protects instead the formal choices, the stylistic and editorial techniques, created by an author.

The Court ruled that the text of plaintiff Antonio Prestigiacomo, "The Restless Prince. The life of Raimondo Lanza di Trabia "undoubtedly enjoys copyright protection both in terms of originality and novelty. As for the originality, Prestigiacomo’s Book is in fact configured as the personal result of the harmonization of real facts, also historical, and true facts, organized and stylistically reworked with a particular technique. The text is in fact the fruit of the alternation, in the narrative fabric, of interviews articulated in questions and answers, clearly identifiable by the presence of the quotation marks, made by the author to various characters who have had direct knowledge of the Prince.

However, the Court ruled that with respect to the identity of the main character and of many events narrated, there is a certain distance between the two stories, so to believe that they are autonomous creative works, belonging to different genres, each individually protected.

The work of Prestigiacomo cannnot in the end be considered plagiarized by that of Marcello Sorgi and that the biographical works of well-known personalities, but not with reference to the facts and the events that concerned them,are not monopolizable.

Embedding a Tweet could be Copyright Infringment

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.

This case began when Justin Goldman accused online publications, including Breitbart, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media, and the Boston Globe, of copyright infringement for publishing articles that linked to a photo of NFL star Tom Brady. Goldman took the photo, someone else tweeted it, and the news organizations embedded a link to the tweet in their coverage Goldman said those stories infringe his copyright.

Courts have long held that copyright liability rests with the entity that hosts the infringing content—not someone who simply links to it.

This is generally known as the “server test,” originally from a 2007 Ninth Circuit case called Perfect 10 v. Amazon, and provides a clear and easy-to-administer rule. It has been a foundation of the modern Internet.

We hope that the Ninth’s Circuit ruling does not stand. If it did, it would threaten the practice of in-line linking that benefits millions of Internet users every day.

EVEN A WINE GUIDE IS A PROTECTED CREATIVE WORK.

In a recent decision, the Court of Rome ruled on an unfair competition case between two wines guides "Bibenda" (published by Bibenda Editore) and "Vitae" owned by AIS (the Italian Sommelier Association). The Court found relevant similitudes both relating to the physical format of the Guide and the descriptions of companies and wine production data, and "strong elements of consistency in the sequence of arguments".

Immediately after the interruption of a collaboration between the two parties, AIS  began to distribute a new Wine Guide to its members, called "Vitae", but it appeared to the authors of "Bibenda" too similar, under a multiplicity of points of view, to the one created by them according to well-defined editorial criteria. Criteria which, according to the judgment, are sufficiently similar to those adopted by Ais for "Vitae". For this reason the Court upheld Bibenda Editore's requests and stopped the publication of future editions of "Vitae". Ais was also sentenced to pay damages (still to be quantified) in favor of Bibenda Editore.

According to the judgment of the Court "an analysis of the guide published by the defendant (AIS) shows significant similarities with the Bibenda’s Guide in relation to the volume size, the material used for the cover, the binding and the fonts used and the format.

Significant similarities can be found in company descriptive descriptions, in both guides, with the same sequence and within an identical structural context and according to a common graphical presentation, data relating to company name, address, internet site, mail address, year of foundation, property, bottles produced, vineyards, direct sales, company visits, introductory part, name wine, typology, grapes, alcohol content, price, bottles produced, tasting, winemaking and matching.

It is also common to evaluate products with symbols placed on the right side of the pages.

As already noted, the two guides have strong similar elements in the sequence of arguments (...) ". On the basis of these arguments, the Court of First Instance upheld Bibenda’s claim and prevented the Italian Sommelier Association from publishing Vitae's guidebook unless significant adjustments would be made to substantially differentiate it from Bibenda's guide.

Wild Selfie

A US court has recently put an end to the legal battle over Naruto’s selfie, the Indonesian macaque which became famous for his selfie. The Court's ruling was in favour of Mr. Slater, the owner of the camera, and rejected the claims of PETA, a US non-profit organization, which supported for the monkey’s rights.

The bizarre case in 2011, when David Slater, a professional photographer, was travelling in the Indonesian wild forest to capture with his camera some of the most spectacular animal species. Slater bumped into a group of monkeys and left his camera unattended for a few moments when a photogenic macaque, Naruto, grabbed his camera and began to shoot hundreds of selfies. Some of these, as well as those of the best instagrammer, were moved and blurred, others, instead, were almost perfect. The photographer published one of the photos on his blog and immediately the image became viral. Based on a literal interpretation of American copyright law, Wikimedia, the American-owner company of the Wikipedia domain, decided to include the image in its collection of Wikimedia Commons content, a collection of over 20,000 public images and videos that can be used by the community as they are unaffected by copyrights. According to American law, the rights upon a photo are owned by its author, which is the person who took the photo and, in this case, it was a monkey. Salter opposed the free disclosure of the image he considered to be his own and he gave rise to a legal dispute over intellectual property: if a monkey takes a photo, whose is it?

Over the years, the issue has become increasingly complicated and increasingly absurd: PETA, already known for its provocative battles, filed a lawsuit in the name of Naruto, Slater and also Blurb, a publishing house that published the Wildlife Personalities book, containing many animal pictures, including Naruto’s one.
Both Slater and Blurb presented a "motion for dismissal": a document used in the US legal system in order to explaining that the case against someone is wrong and based on non-existent reason. In this document, Slater wrote, among other things, that "the only relevant fact in this case is that the plaintiff is a monkey that sue for copyright infringement." According to Salter, PETA can not prove that the famous selfie was shot by Naruto and not by another monkey.
And in fact, the judges agreed with him, ruling that he has, and the monkeys cannot own any copyright over a selfie.
Despite this, PETA and David Slater have reach an agreement: the photographer will pay 25% of the revenue generated by his copyright to the non-profit organization.
 

The EUCJ's Ruling on Pirate Bay.

With the recent judgment C-527/15, the European Court of Justice has stated the copyright infringement by "The Pirate Bay", a file sharing web portal. The ECJ affirms that Copyright is violated even if files are uploaded by third-parties, (i.e. the users), as "Pirate Bay’s administrators can not ignore the fact that their platform gives access to published works without the permission of the rights holders."

The arguments used by the Court to censure Pirate Bay seems quite innovatie with respect to the philosophy that has been the base of these operators’ business so far.

Firstly, the Court of Justice ruled that sharing platform managers establish, through their activities, a form of public communication which, under Article 3 of Directive 2001/29 / EC, requires the right holder’s consent for the use of the work in question. In fact, administrators, by publishing content uploaded by users, play an "crucial role" in making them available, such as indexing and managing the various files, categorizing works and deleting old and obsolete files. Lastly, in its observations the EU Court has pointed out that sharing website are liable also because of the considerable advertising revenue generated by the publication of these files.

It is clear that this ruling regards the whole online sharing platform system and increases the responsibility for illegal content uploaded by users.

According to some experts, however, the ruling will have an impact not so much in the world of piracy but rather in the legal sharing video website and on the social network. In fact, having held that works’ provision on a sharing platform constitutes a public communication has more effect on free sharing platforms, such as Youtube, which are part of the so-called User Generated Content (UGC) and that use the streaming rather than actual piracy. Therefore the risk is that UGC sites are too easily assimilated to the category of outdated download torrent website like, indeed, Pirate Bay.

The fact that manager is responsible for actively managing and filtering certain content, seems to prefigure a direct and general responsibility for third parties uploads.

The European debate will be heavily influenced by this decision, because in these days the European Parliament is working on a reformation of copyrights and the relative online platforms’ responsibility.

A unique decision by an Italian Court on online streaming.

Uploading films protected by copyright  on the internet is not in itself an illegal activity. This is what has recently ruled a minor Court in Italy, which cancelled an administrative fine of more than 550 thousand euro issued against a website which allowed visitors to watch online pirated movies. 

In particular, the italian judge upheld an action against a decision of 2015, according to which the manager of the website was fined for copyright violation. According to the Italian Court a copyright violation through a web-site that host links to movie and music streaming is not automatic, but it requires an investigation to establish the existence of a scope of profit, as stated under article 171 of the Italian Copyright Law. In this case, the judge has ruled against the existence of a scope of profit, notwithstanding the existence of banners . According to the Court sharing files protected by copyright, allows the owner to save expenses and is not an activity which contains a scope of profit.  

McDonald's Accused of Infringing the Copyright of American Graffiti Artists.

After the restyling of its restaurants, Mc Donald’s is trying to get closer to a younger audience and to defend itself from indiscriminate production of parodistic graffiti that defame the American company’s image.

However, with a huge boomerang effect, the American company attracted many lawsuits for rights violation by graffiti artists who accuse McDonald’s of copying them. The latest lawsuit was filed by Jean Berreau, Dash Snow’s former partner and current manager of his properties.

“Nothing is more antithetical regarding its reputation as outsider than the big companies’ consumerism which McDonald's and its marketing are the most importantexponents”. This is what it is written in the complaint. Snow, who actually was a descendant of a aristocrats French family.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the company’s new style is accused of violating copyright: last 25 March another writer, Norm, sued the fast food chain, accusing it of having copied his famous graffiti made in Brooklyn, in Bartlett Street (“Norm on the fire escape of Bartlett”). Unlike Snow, Norm is not against a commercial use of his job, indeed we worked with big firms. However, in his complaint he asserts that McDonald’s “has decided consciously to coat the walls around the world with its restaurants, by using Norm’s name, his art, style and brand”. Also, the company “has used and is still using copies of Norm’s work of art in several restaurants in Europe and Asia, without his consent. However, in less than a month, the writer renounced the suit, refusing any comment on the event: we don’t know whether Norm and the McDonald’s company come to an agreement.

The Court of Rome Rules on Copyrights Published on Facebook

The court of Rome reaffirms the application of the rules of copyright for the pictures posted on the social network by establishing that publication of photos on the Facebook page of the person who has taken them "does not involve the complete waiver of the relative copyright".

According to the Court, the freedom of use of the content posted by users by setting the 'Public' function does not cover the content that is published and which covered by intellectual property rights of users, for which the only license is the non-exclusive, transferable granted to Facebook". Under this principle the author of some photos published on Facebook was awarded damages against a newspaper that had published the same without permission.

The case stems from the publication of some photos on the personal page Facebook of a young photographer shot in nightclub in Rome. The photos then appeared, unknown to the author, in a national newspaper in support of a series of newspaper articles, related to the phenomenon of frequenting nightclubs by persons of young age and subsequently re-used by some programs television of national importance.

Why Shutting down Pirate Sites is ineffective.

A few years ago Europe witnessed the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to.
Police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses, data centers and arrested more than a dozen individuals connected to the site.
The operation wiped out the largest unauthorized streaming portal in Europe and was praised as a massive success. However, new research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that the effect on end users was short-lived and relatively limited.
In a working paper titled “Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure” researchers examined clickstream data for a set of 5,000 German Internet users to see how their legal and illegal consumption habits changed in response to the shutdown.
One of the main conclusions is that the kino.to raid led to a short-lived decrease in piracy, after which piracy levels returned to normal. At the same time, the researchers observed only a small increase in the use of legal services.
It appears that while users of kino.to decreased their levels of piracy consumption by 30% during the four weeks following the intervention, their consumption through licensed movie platforms increased by only 2.5%,” the paper reads.
Based on the above the researchers conclude that if the costs of the raids and prosecution are factored in, the shutdown probably had no positive effect.
One of the policy implications could be to advise against these type of large piracy raids, as they do very little to solve the problem at hand.
However, the researchers note that the results should be interpreted with caution. For example, it doesn’t include any data on offline sales. Similarly, back in 2011 there were relatively few legal options available, so the effects may be different now.
That said, the current findings shed an interesting light on the limited effectiveness of international law enforcement actions directed at piracy sites.

Italian Radio Station Sentenced to Pay Overdue Neighboring rights

The Court of Milan, with ruling notified on August 2, 2015 sentenced that the nation wide known station radio RTL is obliged to pay to SCF, the Italian consortium of  record producers a sum equal to 2% of the gross receipts.

The judges of the court of Milan have ruled in the context of disputes brought by SCF in 2009 against the major Italian national radio networks. This past April SCF has reached an agreement with other broadcasters involved and judgment continued only against RTL that has not adhered to these arrangements.

The Court, after repeating the substantive and procedural legitimacy of SCF, sentenced  that in the absence of other agreements between the parties, the extent of the compensation for the direct disk or similar device due to the manufacturer in accordance with art. 73 L.A. is equal to 2% of the proceeds.

Copyright enforcement for graffiti?

If it sounds novel to apply copyright to graffiti art, that’s because it is: lawyers who work in this area say it’s not clear anyone has ever tried this in court. Copyright law could be extend to art that's on public walls? It very well may. Anasagasti, a rising star in Miami’s art scene, was the first graffiti artist to seek protection for his work: he hired a lawyer and filed a copyright infringement accusing American Eagle of stealing his work and looking for monetary damages.

Later, a large number of other artists filed suits against various corporations for copyright infringement. One was against the Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli for creating clothing, bags, and shoes that supposedly misappropriated a San Francisco street mural as its background print. All the artists claim their artwork was created legally and registered for copyright. Actually in the United States the requirements to obtain copyright for visual art are very low, there are only two requirements for an artwork to be eligible for copyright: it must be secured in a fixed medium and it must be original.
The lawsuits affirm that corporations have gone beyond any exception, putting the street art to use for their own commercial purposes. As Anasagasti’s suit argues, “In today’s fashion industry, affiliation with artists bearing such ‘street credibility’ is highly required by retail brands for the cultural reputation and access to the profitable youth demographic that it offers.”

How much is that street credibility worth? Both lawsuits spread some light on how could this value be measured. In Anasagasti vs. American Eagle as well as in the San Francisco artists suing Roberto Cavalli the value has been determined on sales data, including its software that tracks exactly how many customers viewed the ads and subsequently made purchases.
It’s not clear why the defendants wouldn’t have reached out to ask the artists for permission to use their work. They must have just thought that urban artists aren’t organized and aren’t going to think about copyright protection.

Nothing could be more antithetical from the “street culture” than luxury and glamour.

Seeking copyright protection may sound like the latest evolution of street art away from its outsider origins, but street artists have always pretended greater control over their work. Street artists don’t earn easily with their works, if corporations take advantages of their works, they deserve to be paid. If somebody's going to profit from this art, copyright may be just the instrument for ensuring that somebody is the artists themselves.

By Francesca Filipo

How are Moral Rights treated under Italian Copyright Law?

As other civil law countries, Italian Law recognizes moral rights under the current copyright legislation.

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation.

All these rights can be retained by the copyright holder regardless of the status of the economic rights.

In Italy, it is not possible for authors to assign or even waive their moral rights. This is following a tradition in European copyright itself, which is not regarded as an item of property which can be sold, but only licensed.

The purpose of the law is to protect the moral personality of the author as manifested in his work, provided it falls within what may be the subject of protection.

Italian Law places no time limit for claiming Moral rights; at the author's death the moral right may be claimed by his spouse and children and, in their absence, by parents and other ascendants. Each one of these can act without the consent of the other.

Moral right are inalienable and cannot be traded in any form.

YouTube Threatened with Big Copyright Lawsuit

Global Music Rights is a performing rights company that competes with other collecting societies such as ASCAP and BMI. Its clients include Pharrell Williams, John Lennon, The Eagles and Smokey Robison.

It claims that more than 20.000 videos are not licensed. Royalties that could amount to hundred of millions of dollars.

CEO Irving Azoff says that Google Inc. the owner of YouTube has shown no willing to cooperate and threatened to sue the company for copyright infringement.

Google responded by accusing Global Music Rights of attempting to circumvent the DMCA.

Google already settled a claim with Viacom this year by claiming that no money changed hands.

The Battle over the Next Great Disruptive Technology

By Francesca Filipo and Martina Clochiatti

A 3D printer turns a blueprint into a physical object, built up layer by layer with a computer aided design program (CAD) simply running on your desktop computer.

Since 3D printers turned 3D printing professional services into low cost and on demand facilities, a wide range of products can be easily designed and manufactured at home. Any type of design can be found on the net where 3D printing communities share their files. No matter how it is created, once the CAD design exists it can be widely distributed just like any other computer file.

In many ways today’s 3D printing community resembles the open source community of the early 1990s. There is no central institution giving directions: users themselves invest time and thought in the evolutionary process. They are a relatively small, technically proficient group sharing their creations.

Popular websites like thingverse.com or shapeways.com where anyone may upload and download the design of a number of items were immediately facing IP rights infringement claims.

Recently, Moulinsart, which owns the rights to the cartoon Tintin, served Thingiverse with a Millennium Digital Copyright Act takedown notice. Thingiverse has been forced to remove a design individually developed by an user and freely inspired to Tintin character.

The same happened for the famous Star Wars Yoda character that, despite being turned into different objects, still represents a copyright infringement. The bust of Yoda is not something that you can duplicate or re-elaborate: “Even when designers take an object like that and change it, it's still legally protected”, as Disney legal team said.

Copyright, designs, patents and registered trademarks are the four IP classes that may be infringed by using a 3D printer. Many of these issues have already been discussed with regard to file-shared music and movies. Although 3D printing of copyrighted objects at home may constitute an infringement, the copyright will become increasingly impractical or impossible to enforce.

Technically, a consumer who copies a work by printing an already existing object will be liable for copyright infringement unless the consumer has permission from the copyright owner or only privately uses the printed object.

In this context the majors industries are trying to fight back the new digital era developments by strengthening IP rights, however it is undeniable that at some point a compromise will be necessary.

Creative Commons : Ideas Worth Spreading.

An inflexible copyright policy that prevents any type of disclosure could be anachronistic in the digital era. To realize the full potential of the Internet, encouraging a spreading creativity, many possibilities have been thought. Many of them have been just utopian, but one of these showed a revolutionary potential.

That’s the so called “Creative Commons”.

Launched in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and one of the leading experts of Copyright Law, this project achieved a large success and a wide application in the recent years.

Creative Commons licenses are not against copyright, instead they depend on the existence of copyright. These licenses are legal tools that creators and other rights holders can choose to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving some other rights.

Those who want to make their work available to the public for limited uses while preserving their copyright may want to consider using CC licenses. Others who want to reserve all of their rights under copyright law wouldn’t choose to use it. Creative Commons licenses offer creators a wide spectrum of choices between keeping all rights and renouncing all rights (public domain), an approach that we call "Some Rights Reserved."

Creators can choose among different protection regimes. While some of them refrain commercial uses or the sharing of adaptations, others grant just a minimum protection consisting in the paternity right.  The author doesn’t need any authorization or permission before licensing his work under CC, he just has to decide which conditions he wants to apply to his work. Accordingly, each work will be shared with a different disclaimer, an user friendly detailed tag.

Creative Commons is not an alternative to collecting societies, but a no-profit organization. Therefore all licenses can be use for free with any authorization requirements.

In Italy  Creative Commons could be perceived as an obstacle as it could be interpreted as incompatible with the authority granted by the Italian Copyright Law of 1942 to SIAE, the legal monopolistic society for the management of copyright in Italy.

The recent Directive 2014/26/EU states, however, the principle that rights holders should be able to freely choose to entrust the protection of their works to the collective management bodies they consider most appropriate, also to independent management entities, regardless of the state of nationality. The Directive also grants the authors the right to divide the protection of their works between different collecting societies.

The new standards should promote the coexistence of the CC licenses with the traditional collecting societies, to create a more flexible and efficient system of protection.

This system thought by Lessig affirms a belief in copyright, because it is in essence a copyright license, but it also affirms the innate value of those digital environments where the rules of exchange are not necessarily defined by economic criteria.

What is Digital Watermarking and How it Works.

Digital Watermarking is defined as non detectable marking on images, videos, 3D data, audio or text. They can be read by computer assisted methods. Digital Watermarking may contain several different watermarks simultaneously.

Digital Watermarking is used for different purposes. Digital Watermarking helps in the prosecution of copyright infringement. Unlike metadata, Digital Watermarking directly interwoven with the content to be marked, with steganographic methods. In the case of the robust watermark this integration ensures that the elimination of the watermark makes it unusable.

In various research and development projects that focused initially on the area that processes have been developed mainly for commercially relevant content such as audio and video data and 3D models. There are also Digital Watermarking methods such as for marking databases, musical notes, still images and text.

Occasionally, semi-transparent overlays in images or videos, for example, logos or copyright information, mistakenly referred to as digital watermarking. The usage is misleading, as that neither the carrier (image or video) might not necessarily be available in digital form, the Digital Watermarking is read out digitally. A superimposed semitransparent photo lettering is clearly traceable to the origin, without any need of digital technology.

Digital Watermarking has different characteristics; perceptibility denotes the influencing of the quality of the labeled content, robustness, detectability are other points.

The nature of the embedded message is determined by the application. This can be, for example, in the case of the proof of authorship, information regarding the copyright owner. In the general case metadata is embedded; Unique identification number of the contents similar to the ISBN is used in those cases.

Both classes of methods – digital watermarking and digital fingerprinting – belong to the class of passive protection mechanisms. In contrast to active defense mechanisms, such as encryption which is used to prevent unauthorized access to the content.

A special class of Digital Watermarking are reversible Digital Watermarking techniques. Here, the embedded Digital Watermarking can be removed and the original message can be recovered. This brings you the recovery information in addition to the newly introduced. Applications of this reversible Digital Watermarking technique is used in medical image processing.

Internet Copyright Infringement: 5 Myths vs. Facts

If you Run a Website or post to social media you are probably breaching copyright and you don’t even know it!

Myth 1. Once a ‘Work’ is posted online it loses copyright protection. Wrong!

Fact: You cannot use, copy or post someone else’s photo’s, images, songs or articles without their permission. The person who created them owns these ‘works’ and they have copyright protection form the moment the ‘works’ were created and they loose this ownership protection according to their national laws (usually 50 or 70 years after their death).

Myth 2. I can copy a ’work’ online provided I give the owner credit or a link back.

Fact: You cannot use other people’s ‘work’ unless they first give you permission. Some websites

say you can use any material from their site provided you link back and give them permission unless it’s specifically granted on the ‘work’.

Myth 3. If I alter the ‘work’ or inly use part of it, I am not breaching copyright.

Fact: Derivative works are still covered by Copyright. The only exception is if you are writing a critique and you are referring to the ‘work’. This is considered fair use.

Myth 4. If there is no copyright symbol or notice the ‘work’ can be freely used.

Fact: there is no requirement to display a Copyright symbol or register any work to have copyright protection. A work is protected from the moment it is created and the owner does not lose their copyright if they don’t use the Copyright symbol.

Myth 5 I can use another person’s ‘work’ as long as I don’t’ profit financially from it.

Fact: you are breaching copyright whether you make money or not. The argument that you are giving the owner free advertising does not count. Any money you make would be taken into account by a court decision against you.