According to the Italian Copyright Law (Law 633/1941 and subsequent amendments), the author owns all the moral rights (paternity, integrity, withdrawal of the work from commerce) inalienable and non-transferable and the rights of economic or patrimonial use (reproduction, transcription, distribution, communication to the public, translation, processing, rental/loan) may be transferred in part or exclusively.
According to Article 19 of the Act, economic use rights “are independent of each other and the exercise of one of them does not exclude the exclusive exercise of each of the other rights”.
In the case of a publication, it is not necessary to assign all rights exclusively in order to be published.
The exclusive transfer of their rights results in the loss of control over their work, the impossibility of publishing it online, depositing it in the institutional archives of their university, distributing it to students in class, reusing it in part in subsequent works, etc.
To avoid having to negotiate with the publisher about the use of your work, you can use tools such as:
- Creative Commons licenses
- TheAddendato Edition contracts, i.e. additions that aim to modify the standard edition contract prepared by the publishers, in which the author reserves certain rights (e.g. reuse for educational purposes). The Addendum is a document that can be delivered to the publisher together with the Copyright Transfer Agreement.
Some
SPARC Addendum
Science Commons SCAE models
If the contribution has already been published, you can ask the publisher for permission to deposit in the institutional archive.
Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons gives you the ability to grant permission to the public to use and disseminate your creative work under copyright law. To use them, you do not have to have transferred all rights to a publisher or you must have permission from the publisher to issue a certain version of your publication under these licenses.
From a user/user perspective, a CC license on a copyrighted work answers the question: «What can I do with this play?»
There are six types of licenses:
| Licence designation | License Name | What does this mean for you as an author? |
| CC BY | Attribution | The most liberal of the CC licenses apart from CC0 public Domain dedication. This license allows others to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon a work – also commercially – provided they credit the author for the original creation and clearly indicate that changes were made to the work, if any. |
| CC BY-SA | The Attribution share AlikeAttribution | Similar to CC BY; however, others must license new creations under identical terms. Therefore, all new works reusing (parts of) these work will need to carry the same license and any derivatives will also allow commercial use² |
| CC BY-DND | Attribution NoDerivatives | This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, provided it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the author. |
| CC BY-NC | Attribution Non-commercial | With this license others must not remix, tweak, or build upon the original work for commercial purposes. Although new works must also acknowledge the author and be non-commercial, reusers do not have to license their derivative works on the same terms. |
| CC BY-NC-SA | Attribution Non-commercial ShareAlike | This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work non-commercially, provided they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. |
| CC BY-NC-ND | Attribution Non-commercial NoDerivatives | This is the most restrictive of the six licenses, only allowing others to download works and share them with others as long as they credit the author, but they cannot change them in any way or use them commercially. |