Dr. Masouda Emara
Lecturer (A) – Private Law
Faculty of Law and Political Science
University of Blida 2 – Algeria

Abstract:

Our study sheds light on the changes we are experiencing today in the transition, to a knowledge society, which has become a necessity, and its implications for copyright, through the availability of information and communication technology, free access to information in light of the new trend towards free access to information. Our study is limited to projecting traditional rules regulating copyrights and its suitability for application in the virtual world, on the one hand, and on the other hand, reviewing the new vision of the budget or the transition from individual copyright to the generality of copyright, through common ownership, which represents a type of support for information in the digital environment, and a new kind of protection over the Internet.
The importance of the study is evident in light of the increasing use, of the Internet and the ease of publishing, copying and, downloading of works, over the Internet. Which protection is able to cope with copyrights in the virtual space? Is it the traditional copyright law protection? Or is it the protection of common creativity which represents new visions for the protection of works? This is in addition to urging raising public awareness of the importance and necessity of protecting these rights in the digital age.
This study aims to contribute to the definition of public creativity as a new vision of protection in the virtual world and spread awareness of its importance, and its role in supporting free access to information as well as to clarify the reality of common creativity in the Arab world, as a new vision of protection in parallel with the protection of copyright law, and introduce real solutions to protect copyright in the digital environment.
This study is based on the descriptive approach to its consistency with the nature of the study to extrapolate the literature published on the subject, and we reached a number of results, the most important of which are: Arabic digital content is still weak as it does not exceed 1% of the global production on the Internet, in addition to the lack of local legislation in most Arab countries confronting the digital environment, the lack of awareness of the culture of free access in the Arab societies in general and Algeria in particular, and the lack of recognition of the public domain innovation mechanism as an image of protection in the digital environment in many countries of the Arab world.
Finally, we recommend that the Algerian legislator, in particular, and the Arab world in general, should pay attention to creative generalities as a means of protection in the digital environment, and to include them in the law of copyright and relevant rights, as they are suitable to the digital environment as followed in Egypt, Jordan and Qatar. This is in addition to modifying it to suit the age of digitization and create a digital Arabic library through which the whole world opens to itself.

Key words: intellectual property, digital environment, information society, common property, free access, creative commons, shared property, virtual world.

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