CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTION IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Abstract

In the digital era, for many industries, especially creative ones, the copyright protection became one of the core issues to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. Taking this into consideration, for modern industries intellectual property is a key value generator and a success factor in competitive markets. Thus, nowadays, we assist to a continuous intensification of attention paid by both business leaders and public authorities to the field of intellectual property. Although the major features of the digital era impact every domain of intellectual property, the most affected fields are copyrights and related rights. The challenges of the intellectual property system in general and particularly of the copyright to respond to economic realities, but also the appropriate strategies for their further development in the digital era, is the object of study of this paper. The aim of this paper is to consider the copyrights protection system from the perspective of a plurality of relevant factors that directly or indirectly affect and are affected by intellectual property: law, technology, public policy, economics, and sociology. There is the conviction that only considering all those factors it will become possible to find the correct answer to the question regarding how to better address the issue of copyright protection in the digital era.