ABSTRACT

Mobile communication is an increasing reality in the Western world, and authored contents, from the most amateur ones to the most professional, from individual Works to collective and derivative news, emphasizes some legal questions related to copyright and intellectual property that should be carefully considered in the digital market. Questions such as whether user-generated contents should be enacted, following the Canadian initiative, whether geolocalization and geoblocking could affect freedom of access to users, whether digital identity and the possibility of tracking them could affect basic personal and moral right of authorship, or whether territorial licenses are still a good legal instrument to be applied in an increasingly globalized world, are the ones we pose in this paper. Since copyright is the legal instrument used from the sixteenth century onwards to ensure rights, personal and entrepreneurial, to people and organizations who invest time and money in their effort in exchange of some reward, being it recognition or economic returns, we intend to examine to which extent is the intellectual property-copyright system still a useful tool to face new problems, and to which extend could national laws respond to transnational market necessities, to which extent users can be sure that their rights as consumers and eventual producers would be respected in a supposedly harmonized legal environment, in which two great legal cultures live together, and sometimes collide: Common Law and Civil Law, and in which nation-based legal and market fragmentation is still a reality.