All rights reserved: when copyright prevails

For quite some time now, under the articles of “La Repubblica” the note appears© All rights reserved (Corriere della Sera has been doing this on all versions since August 4). In practice, as stated in thecopyright law, the articles from “la Repubblica” may not be reproduced in any way.

In particular, Law of April 22, 1941, no. 633 on the “protection of copyright and other rights related to its exercise” in article 65 says: “articles about current events of an economic, political, or religious nature, published in magazines or newspapers, or broadcast or made available to the public, and other materials of the same nature, may be freely reproduced or communicated to the public in other magazines or newspapers, including on radio or television, if reproduction or use has not been expressly reserved, provided that the source from which they are taken, the date, and the name of the author, if indicated, are mentioned.”

Articles published in the magazines I manage are also copyrighted, and yet…Yet every day I struggle with unscrupulous “copy-paste masters” who not only (as we have seen) break the law, but make money (thanks to AdSense, which in my opinion should enable accounts based on quality, not quantity) at the author’s expense. This includes aggregators and SEOs. Speaking of the latter, without wanting to generalize since there are many professional and ethical SEOs, recently we had an article copied by someone (as he introduced himself) from this category. When we requested the removal of the copied article, we were told we didn’t understand his work.Being an SEO, he needs to experiment daily with how search engines behave with content (other people’s). Maybe we don’t understand, but we invited the “alleged SEO” to experiment with his own content.