Abstract

This article analyses the shrinking areas of maneuvers that copyright law grants to libraries after the advent of the Internet. Digital technologies should have fostered libraries' capacity to spread information, to enhance services and embrace new functionalities. Instead, a careless legislative operation - that goes under the name of «digital copyright» - concentrated in the hands of copyright holders the rights to decide what uses the libraries could offer to their users and allowed them to adopt technological measures of protection to enforce their decisions. The same digital copyright provisions neglected to state that the space of freedoms that have always been granted to libraries could not be overridden by either the contract or the technology, let alone by their combined adoption.