The Impact of Digitalization on Ways of Thinking about The Rights of Property: Are We all “Owners” or “Users”?

The paper analyzes how emerging technologies, and especially the Internet, can affect the national and European legal system, transforming the fundamental rights and freedoms involved, challenging the traditional categories and qualifications of property, and, in more general terms, stimulating, if necessary, a re-thinking of the man-thing relationship in the light of parameters and references other than those that have been classically used. More specifically, the idea of creating a regulatory framework that accompanies the evolution to which the concept of property is exposed in a digital age pushes us to carry out an analysis of the framework referable to copyright, especially as far as it concerns the F/OSS software with non-copyleft effect, to understand more clearly if the present conceptual apparatus has problematic features or if the issues that the internet poses can be managed in the already existing normative-conceptual framework.