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News
December 7, 2001
World
intellectual-property treaty set to enter force
By Rick
Perera (InfoWorld)
An International Treaty designed to protect
copyright holders in the "digital age" is ready to become law, now that 30
countries, including Japan and the United States, have ratified it.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty, or WCT, is
designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose
work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media. The West African
nation of Gabon acceded to the pact Thursday, allowing it to take effect March
6, WIPO said.
"It's a big day, not just for copyright, but for our culture and information
industries," said Jørgen Blomqvist, director of WIPO's copyright-law division.
"We want culture, we want music, we also want to get access to films over the
Internet. In order to get that done, the Internet has to move from the Wild West
into a reasonably civilized area, and these treaties are the basis for that."
Among major industrialized nations, only the United States and Japan have
ratified WCT thus far. The European Union is expected to do so, but the
parliaments of all 15 EU member states must first separately pass an EU
directive with similar provisions, a process expected to be completed by late
December 2002, Blomqvist said.
WCT sets international norms for the protection of literary and artistic works,
a broad category that includes books, computer programs, music, art, and movies.
It updates the major copyright treaty currently in effect, the Berne Convention
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which was originally adopted
in 1886, and most recently revised in 1971.
The new pact clarifies "that the right of reproduction as we know it in the
analogue world also applies" to the Internet and digital media, Blomqvist said.
"So when you copy a work from a hard disk to a server, it is reproduction."
Older copyright agreements were designed for traditional media like
broadcasting, where "you have a push medium, where someone is deciding which
works users shall have at a given time," he said. "Now the situation is
different with the Internet, because the individual user is pulling the work to
him- or herself ... you could argue it is a private, closed communication not
involving the public and therefore not copyright protected."
A related agreement, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT),
specifically protects the digital-media rights of producers and performers of
sound recordings, updating an existing 1961 convention. So far 28 of the minimum
30 countries have signed it; WIPO predicts that WPPT will also enter force in
the near future.
The treaties do not specify enforcement provisions, but both WCT and WPPT
require signatory states to adopt appropriate measures -- not an easy task,
Blomqvist acknowledged.
"It's quite clear that there are difficulties in this area, comparable to other
areas like piracy of CDs and CD-ROMS," he said. "On the Internet, it's most
likely that we will go more and more into legal protection complemented by and
supported by technological protections."
WCT and WPPT require countries to "provide adequate legal protection and
effective remedies against the circumvention of technological measures, such as
encryption."
Rick Perera is a
Berlin correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.
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