Wash Post on WIPO legislation

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

Washington Post editorial in Today's (October 5, 1998) paper, regarding
WIPO legislation.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/05/027l-100598-idx.html

Copyright Fight


Monday, October 5, 1998; Page A20 

A HOUSE-SENATE conference this week will take up a long-contentious bill
to bring copyright law into the digital age. The controversy does not
lie in the bill's general thrust, which is to implement two
international copyright treaties passed in 1996 by the World
Intellectual Property Organization. Nearly everyone agrees that
copyright laws ought to work in the Internet-borne future more or less
as they have in the past -- that is, to protect the makers of
"intellectual property," whether novels or movies or software, while
still
preserving free movement of information and its availability for
cultural and educational use without licensing.

The issues that have dogged the lawmakers lie in the details of
translating that balance of protections into cyberspace. In this new
world, "intellectual property" of all kinds has become wildly lucrative,
and corporations that own and distribute it have greater and greater
reach. On the other side, unauthorized copying via computer is far
easier and can virtually eliminate the market for a digitized movie or
recorded song. That has left the conference committee struggling with
warring House and Senate approaches to "fair use," shorthand for uses of
copyrighted material for which no permission is required  -- quoting
published material for comment or criticism, reading a book, borrowing a
book from a library or copying an article for personal research.

The danger is that in protecting digital works from unauthorized
copying, distributors could choke off fair use access as well. The
Senate, pushed by movie and record distributors and other big commercial
copyright holders, passed a bill that envisions "locking" all computer
copies and makes it a crime to "circumvent" any such locking device.

The House, under pressure from libraries and researchers, added a rule
that this provision be scrutinized every two years for its effects on
fair use. That's the minimum protection the conference ought to keep,
though it would make even more sense to limit the anti-circumvention
clause to cases where the circumvention amounts to stealing (i.e.,
disabling locks on rental movies).

The conference should also drop a last-minute House amendment that would
create a new copyright protection not merely for expression or
arrangement of facts in a database -- the traditional basis -- but also
for any "substantial portion" of the facts themselves. This would
reverse a 1991 Supreme Court decision that found no property right in
the phone numbers in a phone directory.  In the 1996 treaty, the United
States declined to support such a proposal after fierce opposition from
scientists, libraries, archivists, Internet businesses and others who
argued that it would crimp both public access to public information and
the development of "value-added" information services.

Database protection has never had Senate hearings; the Justice and
Commerce departments and the Federal Trade Commission all have urged
that it be put off a year and weighed separately. It's good advice. 

-- 
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
202.387.8030; f 202.234.5176
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org