Copyright rhymes with responsibility. Even social media can learn

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The gravy train is over in Menlo Park. Mark Zuckerberg has to open his wallet. This time, if we may be ironic, not for normal business activities, also technically called “buy-or-bury”, that is, acquisition activities that aim to incorporate threatening subjects in terms of competition into a single increasingly carnivorous ecosystem (and equipped with the resources to be so) in order to consolidate their dominant position – to be clear, Meta Platform Inc. would have done it, first with Instagram and then with WhatsApp, and precisely for this, in the Court of the District of Columbia, Mr. Zuck was recently called to defend himself (which he then did brilliantly: growing, of course, is not a crime). No. Here we are talking about something else. We are talking about the old copyright . About intellectual property, this Stegosaurus. Meta was sentenced by the Turin court to pay 126 thousand euros (plus trifles in the order of 25 thousand, "litigation costs") for the improper use of 54 photos taken by Gianni Minischetti, the photojournalist who obtained an exclusive service from Oriana Fallaci, the last for which the journalist posed.

Archaic as you like, especially in a culture that makes flow, movement and perpetual overwriteability its dancing reason for being, but the reasons for being cannot determine those for having. And not even those for spreading, especially if the work was done by someone else, if this work is artistic and professional in nature, and if the copyright of this same work is legitimately held: let's not say theft, no, misappropriation yes. And Zuckerberg should be happy too: Meta can't control everything, of course, but protecting copyright means protecting those who offer digital platforms useful content to spread them, to make them viral. Up until now, faced with cases like these, our Marcantonio Tech has defended himself by invoking section 230, a safeguard clause provided by US telecommunications law, which exempts platforms from liability for user-generated content. However, in this story, liability is the key word. Besides repetition: there is a ban on reusing other people's stuff, knowing that it belongs to others - write it in the timeline a hundred times, please.

Strange that the hammer of a verdict is needed to remind the champions of Big Tech that social media are not free zones, endless Johnfordian prairies where those who have already won win. However, these are always necessary battles. Not so much to criminalize the increasingly stratified structures of knowledge, of generating, of spreading, of digitizing, but because complex society generates cracks, the cracks guard labyrinthine situations, but the fundamentals must remain the fundamentals. The message from Turin is very clear: the empire of sharing – long live the empire of sharing, let this be clear too – cannot be founded on the right to exploit what belongs to others , without others legitimately profiting from it, perhaps by virtue of a superior order of magnitude that is often interpreted, perversely, as a condition of advantage available to the shared – a large-scale version of “do you want to work for us for free? It’s a great opportunity for visibility”.

Last consideration: in the wild whirlwind of hypotheses about what schools should do and don't do (spoiler: everything), perhaps legal training in digital education, on how to use sources and materials, on how to respect their value and the resulting obligations, is even more urgent than the education in the much-invoked affectivity. An education, if anything, in effectiveness: an image is consistency (professional and artistic), the work of others is consistency, and personal responsibility too. Not everything has evaporated, mister Zuck.

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