Negotiators Ink Information Age Copyright Pact

After three weeks of high-stakes wrangling, negotiators in Geneva on Friday adopted the first international copyright treaty for the digital age, bolstering protection against software piracy worldwide and laying the groundwork for increased commerce over the Internet.

A second treaty providing the first global copyright rules to cover musical recordings was also approved. Both treaties need ratification by each participating country’s ruling body.

A third proposed treaty that would have extended copyright protection to databases on the Internet was set aside, as expected, after many countries said they were not ready to address it. Talks were expected to continue on that issue.

One of the most hotly contested provisions in the copyright treaty was dropped from the final pact. It would have labeled even temporary copies of material that computers automatically make when a user is browsing the World Wide Web a violation of copyright.

That left the interests of libraries, Internet users and companies providing Internet access in precarious balance with those of the industries like music and software that rely on copyright protection.

“We’ve now got the rights we needed to address this market,” said Nicholas Garnett, head of the music industry lobby group the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, whose 1,100 members include big record producers BMG, EMI, MCA, Sony Music and PolyGram.

“We’ll see the Internet changing the rules of the music industry rapidly in the coming years, with more and more direct contact between music producers and the public,” he said.

The $40-billion-a-year music industry says digital transmission of recordings could represent a $2-billion market.

The new treaties essentially extend current copyright protections applying to written or recorded works to versions of such works that are distributed electronically over computer networks.

One key problem was how to distinguish a “temporary” copy that shows up when browsing the Web from a “permanent” copy made when a user downloads the material or even sends it on to friends. It was not immediately clear how that distinction will be drawn.

However, copyright owners worked into the night--hours past the original closing deadline--to have similar wording included in a side letter to the treaty that could have strong legal force.

Ed Black of the Computer and Communications Industry Assn. said the compromise was acceptable, although members of his group would have liked explicit wording that exempted communications carriers from responsibility for copyrighted material sent across their networks.

“If this is the bridge to the information age, we still don’t know where the mines are,” Black said.

The 160-nation, three-week negotiating session, under the auspices of the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization, aimed to update the Bern Convention, which took force in 1889 to provide international protection for literary and artistic works and has been revised about every 20 years since.

“These treaties we’ve been working on will be the cornerstone of international economic law for the information and technological age of the 21st century,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bruce Lehman.