Can an exhibition be protected as a work of authorship?

A recent ruling by the Court of Cassation established that an exhibition can be considered a work of the mind and, as such, protected by copyright. Therefore, the curators of an exhibition can be recognized with moral and economic rights. The creation of an exhibition can be the expression of a creative idea: on the one hand, the concept, i.e., the originality of the theme, is protected; on the other, the project, i.e., the creative process that precedes the actual installation. In this sense, exhibitions are the result of a complex and costly planning and organization process, which deserves protection.

The case before the Court concerned a television program broadcast by RAI SAT, which, by re-proposing an exhibition, failed to respect its content, thus violating the economic exploitation rights recognized by law to the authors of the work. The creativity of the exhibition was therefore established, a necessary element for establishing copyright. In other cases, Italian judges had rejected requests for the determination and protection of copyright because it had not been proven in what original way the objects comprising the exhibition had been organized and displayed. Furthermore, in some cases, judges went further and extended the protection to entire museums. This is what happened in Paris, when in 2006 the judges recognized the Henri Langlois Film Museum as a "work of genius."

Although national and international case law seems to agree on granting protection to exhibitions and displays, it is more difficult to classify this category of art within a legal framework established by the legislature. In our legal system, copyright protection is guaranteed by the provisions of Law No. 633 of 1941, which includes all works "in literature, music, the figurative arts, architecture, theatre, cinematography, ... as well as databases which, by virtue of the selection or arrangement of the material, constitute the author's intellectual creation." Through some interpretation, an exhibition could be considered a database, understood as "a collection of works, data, or other independent elements systematically or methodically arranged..." (Article 2, paragraph 9 of Law No. 633/41). Or again, artistic exhibitions could be included within the provisions of Article 4 of Law 633 of 1941, which recognizes derivative works as works of the mind, that is, "creative elaborations of the work itself, such as translations into another language, transformations from one literary or artistic form to another, modifications and additions that constitute a substantial reworking of the original work, adaptations, reductions, abridgements, and variations that do not constitute an original work."

In both cases, an essential condition for the recognition of copyright also for exhibitions and displays is the creation of an original and creative intellectual work.