Disney copyright

Mirko Tavosanis tavosanis at rom.unipi.it
Wed Oct 18 22:10:10 CEST 2000


Hi,

perhaps it's time to say that I published this year (with Fabio Gadducci) a
little book in Italian about copyright in Disney comics :-)

The title of the book is _Casa Disney: Autori e diritto d'autore_
(PuntoZero, Bologna, 2000; ISBN 88-86945-26-4; 14.000 lire or 7,25 euro).
Obviously, we included in the book also interviews with comics creators like
Don Rosa, Luciano Bottaro and Marco Rota. And it was very interesting to
study the strange forms intellectual property can take :-)

Copyright is not a law of nature, of course. The modern concept of copyright
didn't surface until the Eighteenth century, and writers and creators worked
for the publishing industry well before there was something like a copyright
law. Moreover, today's copyright laws are designed according to the needs of
the publishing industry rather than to the needs of the creators: in the
contries that accepted the Berne Convention and the recent German
extensions, copyright now lasts seventy years after the death of a
creator... and this fact has a real meaning only for a publishing house, not
for a creator.

Of course, no one is entitled to break a law. But perhaps it's time for some
changes. Now we have peer-to-peer technology that, coupled with encryption,
could allow users to post on the Internet every kind of "creative work" for
free and without risk of being caught. Could this technology make it
impossible to charge "users" for reading a text or a comic? Perhaps. But
suerly even this would not stop many creators from creating.

Best wishes,

Mirko Tavosanis

http://www.humnet.unipi.it/rogiolo/profili/mirko.html





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