Abstract

The tale of the new European Union 2019 directive for copyrights protection in the web is paradigmatic of a regulation failure. The original failure was contained in the old 2000 directive, that exempted ISPs (Internet Service Providers) from responsibility for publication on websites managed by them. The new failure is a regulatory intervention that develops from previous regulation and looks at the present, if not at the past, state of technological development. But digital revolution progresses exponentially and new technologies could make feasible innovative approaches that a myopic regulator is unable to foresee. In this paper I suggest that Distributed Ledgers Technologies (DLT) and blockchains could provide a possible direction for new forms of copyrights management in the digital era.