The author's right over the economic exploitation of the work

Abstract

With the recent technological advances that occurred in the last decades, principally since the second half of the 1990s, intellectual property as a whole and copyright in particular have experienced the strongest threat ever in the past three centuries. The first threat was Gutenberg's printing press (XV century, between 1445-1450), neutralised in the XVIII century with the Copyright Act of Queen Anne of England, in 1710, which limited the editors' privileges of reproduction, attributing the right of reproduction to the authors of intellectual works. The second threat occurred with the invention of the machines of photostatic reproduction, better known as Xerox copy machines, by the north-American Chester Carlson in 1937. Almost half a century later, it seems that the threat is back; but this time, along with the advance of digital technology and of computers, which give us perfect copies, the internet with no limits favours its fast dissemination at a relatively low distribution cost. Will copyright survive the Internet? But, as far as we can see, copyright is not dead. Its juridical nature has resisted all bad times and will survive this one too.