Rewarding Creativity: In Law, Economics, and Literature

Scientific, literary and artistic products are the outcome of what in the Western world has been called, at least since the 18th century, creative human labor, or simply, creativity. Since creativity is one of the foremost faculties of the human being, it is in the common interest to protect and encourage it. The problem seems only to be how to do it. How is it possible to make laws consonant with this sound and universal tenet? What measures should be taken? But even prior to that: how can one orient himself with confidence in these questions? In a sense, since the dawn of Western culture, these questions have raised serious discussions. However, the shape these questions have taken today is something new; it is the eventual result of a “revolution” begun two and a half centuries ago that upset the way our humankind relates to works of art and thought. This paper explores the question of what does “rewarding creativity” mean today? And what did it meant before the rise of the modern world? Questioning the principles and institutions that regulate and have regulated the rewarding of creativity in Western culture, might allow us to become better aware of our present situation as regards to art, knowledge and learning – knowing full well that this situation is so puzzling that no historical analysis as such can pretend to shed a complete light on it

Non-display uses of copyright works: Google Books and beyond

Copyright @ 2011 The AuthorsWith the advent of mass digitisation projects, such as the Google Book Search, a peculiar shift has occurred in the way that copyright works are dealt with. Contrary to what has so far been the case, works are turned into machine-readable data to be automatically processed for various purposes without the expression of works being displayed to the public. In the Google Book Settlement Agreement, this new kind of uses is referred to as “non-display uses” of digital works. The legitimacy of these uses has not yet been tested by Courts and does not comfortably fit in the current copyright doctrine, plainly because the works are not used as works but as something else, namely as data. Since non-display uses may prove to be a very lucrative market in the near future, with the potential to affect the way people use copyright works, we examine non-display uses under the prism of copyright principles to determine the boundaries of their legitimacy. Through this examination, we provide a categorisation of the activities carried out under the heading of “non-display uses”, we examine their lawfulness under the current copyright doctrine and approach the phenomenon from the spectrum of data protection law as could apply, by analogy, to the use of copyright works as processable data

Positive Copyright and Open Content Licences: How to Make a Marriage Work by Empowering Authors to Disseminate Their Creations

Positive copyright appears to have been progressively turned away from its normative function of ensuring a fair and efficient transmission of human knowledge. The private sector is seeking to counterbalance this phenomenon by adopting legal tools that expand the public domain of knowledge, such as web-based licences modelled on the "open access" approach. The increasing world-wide preference for Creative Commons licences confirms their aptness to transform copyright law into a tool flexible enough to serve authors' several purposes. Such a spontaneous counterbalance experiences many difficulties though, because of the structure that positive copyright has adopted over the last few years. The current situation is an excellent point from which to look back at how authors used to disseminate their works before the advent of the Internet. From a historical view-point copyright has always accomplished the twin functions of economically rewarding authors and enabling communication of their creations to the public. The latter goal is achieved by means of statutory mechanisms limiting the freedom of contract between authors and their counterparts (intermediaries in a broad sense), in order to enforce the authors' capacity to spread their works. In the current digital environment, however, these mechanisms are not likely to accomplish their original functions. This paper seeks to explore an adjustment that will permit authors to take advantage of all the new means of commercial exploitation and non-commercial dissemination of their works offered by the Internet. Such an adjustment aims also at realigning positive and normative copyright by encompassing the use of open content licensing within the current copyright framework

Copyright and the commodification of authorship in 18th and 19th Century Europe.

The modern concept of authorship evolved in parallel with the legal recognition of the author as the subject of certain property rights within the marketplace for books. Such a market was initially regulated by a system of printing privileges, which was replaced by copyright laws at the juncture of the 18th and 19th centuries. The inclusion of copyright under the umbrella of property and the dominating economic discourse marked the naissance of a new figure of the author, namely the author as supplier of intellectual labor to the benefit of society at large. In this sense, products of authorship became fully-fledged commodities to be exchanged in the global market place. The transition between the privilege and the copyright-system, and the prevailing economic rationale for the protection of works of authorship, leaves on the background a more original understanding of authorship as rooted in the human need of reciprocal communication for the sake of truth. Modern authorship, as grounded in a narrow utilitarian understanding of authors’ rights, detaches itself from both the economic logic of the privilege system and the rational foundation of copyright

PROGETTO AERODINAMICO DI UN VELIVOLO "HIGH ALTITUDE LONG ENDURANCE" (HALE) AD ENERGIA SOLARE

Nel seguente lavoro di tesi viene affrontato il progetto aerodinamico di un velivolo high altitude long endurance (HALE) propulso ad energia elettrica ed alimentato da celle solari. Nel panorama mondiale dei velivoli con propulsione elettrica con pannelli solari vengono attualmente proposti velivoli in configurazione convenzionale e velivoli tutt’ ala. In questo studio, che fa seguito ad attività condotte in passato, viene invece adottata una configurazione tipo biplano, che fa riferimento agli studi sul Prandtl-Plane; tale architettura, sulla base dei risultati raggiunti in passato e confermati in questo lavoro, consente di risolvere i problemi strutturali tipici di altre soluzioni. Nella prima parte del lavoro sono stati sviluppati alcuni strumenti utili al progetto: uno script per la creazione della geometria; la modifica del programma open source AVL. In seguito, è stato affrontato il problema di ottenere una configurazione stabile e sono stati scelti i profili alari. Infine è stato sviluppato un modello per la stima delle prestazioni aerodinamiche, con cui sono stati condotti degli studi di sensibilità ai parametri di progetto al fine di delineare delle configurazioni stabili e trimmabili