With order no. 3393 of February 10, 2025, Italy’s Supreme Court ruled on the issue of the protection of moral rights of the author, with particular reference to the distinction between a creative idea relating to a narrative method and a work, as a concrete expression of the idea.
The Case
The plaintiff sued a publishing house and a natural person to have his copyright recognized in relation to a children’s editorial product, published between 1982 and 1994 by another publishing house.
In particular, the plaintiff claimed ownership of the moral rights as the creator of the texts and the iconographic project of the editorial product in question, characterized by an innovative narrative method that uses illustrated cards. The defendant publishing house, starting from 2011, had affixed the name of the defendant natural person in relation to this editorial product without mentioning the plaintiff as its creator.
The Court of First Instance upheld the plaintiff’s claim, recognizing the moral copyright on the editorial product and awarding non-pecuniary damage compensation in his favor, as well as establishing the obligation for the defendant publishing house to include the plaintiff’s name within the editorial product as the author and/or creator of the relative graphic project.
On appeal, the decision rendered in the first instance was confirmed, with a reduction in the amount of non-pecuniary damage recognized.
Against this decision, the losing publishing house, both in the first and second instance, appealed to the Court of Cassation.
The Core of the Appeal and the Decision of the Supreme Court of Cassation
The publishing house argued, as the first ground of appeal, that the Court of Appeal had erroneously granted protection to a mere idea — the innovative narrative method — rather than to its concrete expression. This represented the crux of the legitimacy judgment, through which the appellant contested the violation of Articles 1 and 2 of the Copyright Law (Law 633/1941).
The Supreme Court of Cassation reaffirmed the principle according to which the requirements of originality and creativity provided for by current legislation must be related to the subjective expression of a specific idea. This principle is in accordance with the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union, according to which the concept of a work implies an intellectual creation that reflects the personality of the author, through free and creative choices, provided that it is concretely expressed and therefore identifiable in a sufficiently precise and objective manner.
In light of the above, the Supreme Court considered the first ground of appeal to be well-founded, which absorbed the other grounds put forward by the publishing house, clarifying that copyright protection cannot extend to the idea itself relating to a method of representing a story, but only to its expressive declination.
Therefore, the Court of Cassation established that the lower court, in recognizing the innovative narrative method as an object of protection, had overstepped the boundaries imposed by national and EU legislation and case law.
The Cassation Court, therefore, overturned the contested judgment and referred the case back to the Court of Appeal with a different composition.
Conclusions
The order in question constitutes an important reaffirmation of the boundaries of copyright protection, offering valuable clarification on the distinction between idea and work.
The conception of a narrative method, however original and innovative, is not eligible for protection unless it is transposed into a concrete expressive form.
Elena Bandinelli