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Fracture is a very complicated phenomenon and its dynamics is not well described up to now by a consistent physical and/or mathematical model. In this paper we synthetically present the main experimental and theoretical results for the peeling of an adhesive tape, i.e. a viscoelastic dissipative system, viewed as a two-dimensional fracture propagation. From recent peeling experiments, using a common adhesive tape, the emergence of hierarchical structures in a broad range of time scales was observed in a definite region of the stick–slip regime, and this is one the indicators commonly used speaking of complex systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]