Intellectual Property and Consumer Law in the Knowledge Economy

In the current economic and technological environment, the production, diffusion and exchange of creative works through digital technologies is a phenomenon which has completely changed the conditions of access to knowledge. Nowadays, it is evidently one of the most important assets for economic growth, enterprise, and employment, for enhancing professional, social, and cultural development, and for fostering the creative and innovative capacity of modern society. At the same time, however, technology presents the risk, increased in the digital market, that owners can’t watch over trade: In particular, digital technologies allow perfect, inexpensive, and unlimited copying and dissemination of content. As a consequence, without adequate protection and enforcement, authors may decide not to make their content available in digital environment, so preventing the ultimate goal of intellectual property, as stated in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, i.e. the promotion of «the Progress of Science and the useful Arts», which may also be expressed as the advancement of knowledge and the development of culture. As for the traditional commercial relations between suppliers and consumers, in the digital environment while the supplier aims at providing goods and services without limits on the networks receiving fair prices for them, and in particular exercising some form of control over the use and distribution of digital content in order to maintain a viable business model, the consumer/user looks forward to freely participating in business and social relationships, without risks of violations of her/his fundamental rights, and seeks access to digital services and contents through different media. Therefore, all the networks’ players ask for new means of protection that, reconciling their different needs, allow a fair development of business and social relationships. The paper analyzes, under a comparative perspective, how intellectual property and consumer law interact in the knowledge economy, in particular through a focus on private copying and technical protection measures, in order to highlight the features and limits of users right of access to digital content.