Sofia de Vasconcelos Casimiro finished her PhD at the University of London, Queen Mary College

Vieira de Almeida & Associados (VdA)'s consulting associate, Sofia de Vasconcelos Casimiro has finished her PhD at the University of London, Queen Mary College. Her thesis "Surpassing the shadows of "Copy" right - The decline and fall of the enumeration of economic rights" was presented at Queen Mary's Intellectual Property Research Institute and Center for Commercial Law Studies and approached the role of IT on the evolution of the economic rights of Authors' Rights/Copyright, covering issues such as private copies and computer networks.

This evolution demonstrates that recent amendments have been successively enlarging the enumeration of economic rights, and diminishing the important freedom of information principle, leading to many vulnerabilities such as illustrated with examples such as temporary copies and technological measures.

The thesis makes a distinction between intellectual use and economic use of contents and proposes the abolishment of the enumeration technique, linked to the ancient paper age, and its replacement by a substantive criterion, reserving to the copyright holder solely those acts which consist in giving the access to the intellectual use of protected contents in a way which is potentially profitable.