Abstract

As the scholarly literature has shown, in the 1990s and 2000s anti-piracy campaigns and institutional communication produced by the content industries mostly aimed to frame users and unlicensed activities as «criminal». In the last decade, and in Italy at least since 2013 - when the new «Regulation about copyright protection in electronic communication network» was ratified - a new phase appears to have taken shape. Rather than focusing on piracy as a crime to fight, this new phase addresses creativity and cultural production as a value to protect. Through the analysis of some recent Italian institutional campaigns, contests and reports, this article will discuss firstly how the concept of creativity emerges, with particular attention to an idea of creativity as «individual expression». This definition will be then put into a wider historical and philosophical perspective, in order to de-naturalize it and discuss several important implications for the relations between creative industries, copyright-based industries and the access to culture.