UNDERSTANDING COPYRIGHT

Abstract

Th is article tries to combat some common topics related to the supposed obstacle that copyright and related rights, as they are currently designed by the law, represent for the development of the information and communications technology (ICT). As regards the frequent criticism on copyright owners’ lobby, accusing it of trying to maintain marketing methods coming from the analogical era, and to perpetuate their privileges, and so causing the slowing down of cultural contents spread in the Internet, it is stated that: (i) cultural industries do have made an adaptation to the new forms of exploitation in the digital environment; (ii) the promotion of access to culture does not mean that intellectual assets must be freely supplied by the State or by the copyright owners; (iii) many of the utilizations of copyright protected contents that take place in the Internet on the false pretext of favouring the access to culture, are in fact mere copyright infringements. Regarding the proposal of establishing a model of intellectual creation and production subsidized by State, the article defends that the assignment to the authors of an exclusive property right, subjected to limits and for a determined period of time, permits a better balance between authors’ private interests in their works and society’s general interest in access to culture, as well as this system is as valid in the digital environment as it has been in the analogical one. Th e article also poses the false confl ict between cultural industries’ interests and ICT industries’ ones, and it concludes that there are no reasons for the former to prevail over the latter or vice versa, since both of those industries pursue the same class of selfi sh and private interests. Th e article is written as a sort of review and comment on a series of three articles published in a national newspaper in January 2010, two of them by a very well-known ex politician (Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra) and the other one by a famous novelist (Antonio Muñoz Molina). On the basis of the arguments given by them, and the criticism on those arguments, a didactic exercise is made around basic aspects of copyright and related rights: their reason for being, their aim, and the way in which their legal protection is articulated.