History and significance of copyright

Abstract

Copyright is a topical issue for today libraries and for all the cultural industries stakeholders – from publishers to individual users. What legitimate use can you make of intellectual work? What kind of use restrictions can copyright holders establish? What’s the author’s property on his work? Today is difficult to give a clear answer to these and many other questions.
The paper analyses Chiara De Vecchis and Paolo Traniello’s book (La proprietà del pensiero, 2012) investigating the copyright from an historical, theoretical and legal point of view – with the aim of contributing to the development of a culture of copyright which would take into consideration the reader's rights as well as the author’s rights, and would let librarians play their traditional role of mediators between works protected/promoted by intellectual property rights and patrons’ information needs, in a context that has extremely changed in the last decades.