La autorización de utilización de una obra ajena en la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual chilena

The purpose of this article is to examine how the Chilean Intellectual Property Law regulates the authorization as a mean by which the author allows a third party to exploit his or her work. To accomplish said purpose, we review the manner in which it should be granted, that is, whether it must be explicit or if implied authorizations are also valid. Then, we focus on specifying what the minimum content that this authorization should fulfill is. Both issues are entirely relevant from a practical perspective, since there is ambivalence in recent Chilean Supreme Court decisions about the manner in which the authorization must be granted by the copyright holder and, also, concerning its essential elements. In this article, we propose that the Chilean Intellectual Property Law only allows for explicit authorizations, which must comply, at least, with the content prescribed in article 20, subsection 2 therein.