Can an exhibition be protected as a work of intellectual property?

A recent ruling by the Court of Cassation has established that an exhibition can be considered a work of intellectual creation and, as such, can be protected by copyright. The curators of an exhibition, therefore, may be granted moral and economic rights. The creation of an exhibition can constitute the expression of a creative idea: on the one hand, the concept—that is, the originality of the theme—is protected; on the other, the project—that is, the creative process preceding the actual installation—is protected. In this sense, exhibitions are the result of a complex and costly process of planning and organization that deserves to be protected.

The case brought before the Court concerned a television program broadcast by RAI SAT, which, in presenting an exhibition, failed to respect its content, thereby infringing upon the economic rights granted by law to the authors of the work. The creativity of the exhibition was therefore established, a necessary element for the existence of copyright. In other cases, in fact, Italian judges had rejected requests for the recognition and protection of copyright because it had not been proven how originally the objects comprising the exhibition had been organized and displayed. In some cases, moreover, judges went further and extended protection to entire museums. This is what happened in Paris, when in 2006 judges recognized the Henri Langlois Cinema Museum as a “work of the mind.”

Although case law, both domestic and international, appears to agree on granting protection to exhibitions and displays, it is more difficult to classify this specific case under a legal institution established by the legislature. Under our legal system, copyright protection is guaranteed by the provisions of Law No. 633 of 1941, which covers all works belonging “to literature, music, the visual arts, architecture, theater, cinematography,…, as well as databases that, by virtue of the selection or arrangement of the material, constitute an intellectual creation of the author.” With some interpretive effort, the 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, Law 633/41). Alternatively, the art exhibition could fall under the provisions of Article 4 of Law 633 of 1941, which also recognizes derivative works as intellectual works, namely “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, abridgments, compendiums, and variations that do not constitute an original work.”

In both cases, the essential requirement for copyright protection—including at exhibitions and displays—is the creation of an original and creative intellectual work.