160 Countries Set Treaties on Internet Copyrights

Delegates from the United States and 159 other countries yesterday agreed on two new treaties to fight the electronic piracy of books, software, music and other works on the world's burgeoning computer networks.

U.S. officials greeted the accord as a crucial step to creating a global marketplace on the Internet, which many companies continue to shun out of fear of pilfering of their creations.

One treaty makes a global standard of the kinds of electronic copyright protections that creators of books, movies and other literary and artistic works already enjoy in this country. Another closes a loophole in international law in which there was no explicit agreement covering the duplication of sound recordings off the air or from computer networks.

The agreement was reached in Geneva at the end of a three-week meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) yesterday. Those treaties will now be taken back to the member nations for ratification.

The new treaties "define the realm of the possible in the marketplace of cyberspace," said Bruce Lehman, U.S. commissioner of patents and trademarks, in an interview from Geneva where he led the U.S. delegation. "When there are no rules, it's kind of hard to develop" a market.

Most of the provisions of the treat ies would bring the rest of the world into harmony with the kinds of copyright protections already in place in the United States, Lehman said. For that reason, "there is nothing in these treaties that will change, automatically, the dynamic within the United States."

But it is meant to have deep impact in foreign countries, making it clear that it is illegal to, say, distribute electronic copies of a computer program or a new music CD to a thousand people on a computer network. Curbing such copying, U.S. officials say, could generate new export sales for the United States, whose films, music and software are the most popular in the world.

The consensus on the treaties, even among less developed nations that historically have given less weight to such issues, is a sign of global progress, Lehman said. The idea that "the human brain is something you can make money off of is actually starting to sink in around the world," Lehman said.

Representatives from the 160 countries gathered in Geneva to address the issues of legal protection for those who create works of art, literature, computer software -- the realm of things known generally as "intellectual property" -- in the face of new digital technologies. Today, any of those things can be turned into the ones and zeros of computer communications, and effortlessly copied and transmitted around the globe.

Historically, the United States has sought to maintain what is known as the "copyright balance" between the needs to protect rights of those who produce works and needs of those who would use the information to gain access to it.

Some proposals that the United States brought to the WIPO summit drew fire because they "overreached the boundaries of current protection," said Ephraim Cohen of the Digital Future Coalition, a group composed of the American Library Association, companies from the computer and communications industries, the National Education Association, the Consumer Federation of America and others.

The negotiators dropped a controversial provision that would have for the first time created a property right in databases. Critics of the proposal claimed that such an extension of copyright protection would hinder the work of scientists and educators, and might even allow sports leagues to tighten control over statistics generated by their teams.

Critics of the U.S. position going into the treaty talks worried that the treaties might seriously erode the long-established policies of "fair use" found in American law. That doctrine allows some copying of works for personal use -- a student copying a magazine article at a library, for instance -- so long as the copying doesn't interfere with the commercial interests of the copyright holder. Ultimately, the fair-use standards were not changed.

Telecommunications companies and computer companies opposed tightening the fair use doctrine, saying that it might cover the brief act of copying that is necessary to view a page on the World Wide Web -- and might conceivably make them responsible as contributors to copyright infractions.

Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, applauded what she called "historic copyright treaties." In a statement, the group, one of the strong proponents of tougher protections, said the treaties "succeed in balancing the rights of copyright holders and users, ensuring that the global information superhighway will flourish in the 21st century."

A leading critic of the WI\PO proposals, consumer advocate James Love of the Taxpayer Assets Project, said yesterday, "This is a matter which [Congress] should have acted on before bureaucrats and the United Nations created these new property rights."

Some critics of the initial U.S. proposals, however, breathed a qualified sigh of relief at the outcome. "What we avoided here was a global prescription to do some very dangerous things," said Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association. "Considering the proposals that started out on the table, there's certainly been substantial progress toward a more commonsense approach to all of this.

"At the same time," Black said, "many issues are yet to be resolved."

Since treaties must only provide broad outlines, governments would have to fill in the blanks for how these two treaties would be enforced in their countries. "The actual impact on people has yet to be determined," Black said.