The proposed investigation aims to draw a picture of current possible new spaces for copyright protection.

The presentation will, in particular, expand on whether modern copyright law should be more flexible as to whether new and unconventional works - including graffiti, tattoos, body painting, culinary works, sport movements, yoga, jokes, magic tricks, dj-sets, perfume making, engineered DNA sequences, typefaces, illegal and immoral works - deserve protection. This could be secured, for example, by interpreting the rules on protectable subject matter more broadly as well as relaxing the requirements to obtain protection.

The first copyright statutes granted protection only to a very few works such as books, charts and maps. In several jurisdictions, for example UK, the belief has for long been shared that just selected and closed categories of artistic and creative endeavours deserve to be protected by this intellectual property right. Yet, such belief has subsequently proved anachronistic, also as a consequence of technological progress. Indeed, the subject matter protected by copyright laws has progressively expanded over the years, covering inter alia photographs, phonographs, works of applied art, films and broadcasts, computer programs and databases: this has taken place not only in jurisdictions having an “open-ended list” of authors’ rights subject matter (such as France, Germany and Netherlands), but also in countries with “closed lists”.

The progressive expansion of copyrightable subject matter has not stopped. Authors and creative people are indeed continually finding new ways of expressing themselves, being often difficult to foresee the forms that these new expressive methods will take. And the way the traditional, exhaustive and privileged classification of copyrightable works have been defined (as well as the narrow way “open-ended lists” have often been interpreted by courts) has still little to do with how several contemporary artists, practitioners of new forms of art and entertainment and even commercial enterprises nowadays define their own practice and activity. Therefore, rigid classifications as well as judicial “restrictions” of copyrightable subject matter may (again) become anachronistic as an increasing number of creative human endeavours may produce results which arguably do not fall within any of the enumerated (or judicially identified) categories of protectable works, but that are nevertheless the result of intellectual efforts.

The presentation will focus on those forms of expression (see the list above) which have recently attracted attention amongst copyright scholars. In particular, the subjects have been selected with the mere purpose of identifying trends and highlighting possible commonalities and differences in the progressive expansion of the protectable subject matter. In particular, we have selected just those topics that have had or may have jurisprudential impact or have contributed to policy changes at the national level.