The future of Heritage Science and Technologies from a legal point of view

Abstract

The development and the prospect of future cultural heritage should certainly be confronted with the development of new technologies applied to the arts which, from a legal point of view, implies mainly three important aspects.1. Copyrights for software : this seems to be the least interesting for the jurists as many aspects have already been addressed and solved, and therefore on will just quickly list some of them. In fact the copyright explicitely protects the software as work of wit and consequently it is clear that the author is the dominus of his creation in the sense that he is the only person who can decide how to allow other people use his software. So f.e. the relationship between the copyright legislation and open source is actually less difficult than it maybe thought. In addition open source use is fully regulated by Law no. 633/1941 (so called “legge sul diritto d’autore”) which guarantees its proper use.2. Legal issues related to the so-called BIM technology : Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a software for plannig and implementing building projects based on 3D modeling of buildings or structures models. The BIM has already been adopted internationally for the realization of major project and one of the most exciting challenges for a lawyer is to develop a specific BIM contract for the particular field of art and cultural heritage.3. Legal issues related to artificial intelligence : this certainly represents a field yet to be discovered by jurists and here I will present a series of legal concerns that will engage jurists in the coming years. Such as responsibility and ethics of artificial intelligence. For the above-mentioned considerations, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee approved a report calling on the European Commission to introduce a set of regulations on robotics.