The Proprietary Character of Inheritance Rights in Copyright: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy, with a Test Case from Albanian Law

Context. An author's work outlives its creator by decades. What passes to the heirs — the right to profit from the work, the author's personal link to it, or both — remains one of the least systematised questions in comparative copyright scholarship, despite its undisputed practical weight for literary, musical and artistic estates. Purpose. This article examines the proprietary character of inheritance rights connected with copyright in three legal systems: the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. It seeks to identify the normative common core and, on that basis, the genuine axes of divergence. Method. The analysis is comparative, doctrinal and functional. It reads the principal statutory provisions and leading authority of each system — Title 17 of the United States Code, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), Italian Law No. 633/1941 and the Italian Civil Code — and then compares them not by doctrinal label but by the function each provision performs within its own system. Findings. In all three systems the author's economic rights are treated as property transmissible mortis causa, with a substantially identical term of protection (the author's life plus seventy years), while moral rights follow divergent regimes — personal, quasi-personal, or familial and perpetual. The comparison reveals three models: (a) the American proprietary model, which shields the family from improvident contracts through a termination right that cannot be waived in advance; (b) the British model of testamentary freedom, in which copyright is personal property and the family is protected only ex post through judicial discretion; and (c) the Italian dualist model, in which the economic estate passes subject to forced heirship while moral rights are exercised without time limit by a statutory order of relatives, outside the will. Contribution. The fundamental divergence does not lie in the proprietary nature of the right — on which the systems agree — but in two other variables: the limits placed on freedom of disposition, and what becomes of moral rights after death. The article then tests the scheme against a fourth system, Albanian law (Law No. 35/2016 and the Civil Code), which proves to be a fourth technique — automatic protection confined to minors and to those incapable of work, with no arithmetical quota — and closes with concrete implications for the cross-border estate planning of creative works.