The WIPO conference on electronic commerce and intellectual property — report

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) held a special conference on electronic commerce and Intellectual Property in Geneva, from 13 to 16 September 1999. More than 700 delegates from around the world attended the conference, to share their views on the implications of e-commerce for intellectual property and vice versa. WIPO’s primary objective was to promote a better understanding of the issues involved, and to identify areas where it could play a useful role. More than 60 speakers presented their views, on issues ranging from domain name disputes to cyber-surveillance to museums on-line. With the United States having the most developed internet economy, it came as no surprise that many presentations focused on the US. Two issues reappeared in many different presentations and were also debated heatedly in the lobby: piracy and on-line liability. One of the most remarkable recurring themes was piracy: both the extent of current piracy and yet the progress being made in combating it. American representatives of the software, music, and motion picture industries all gave chilling examples of how their works are currently being pirated, and how easy it is for users to confuse pirate sites and illegal copies with legitimate sites and legal products. At the same time the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act have provided useful weapons against piracy. Cooperation between internet service providers (ISPs) and content owners on shutting down pirate sites appeared to be working. Some content providers even told anecdotes of ISPs calling them up when pirated works appeared on the web. The on-line liability issue naturally focused on the US solution, outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and on the extremely heavily debated Article 5.1 of the European Union (EU) draft directive on copyright and related rights. It was interesting to see how entrenched the different views have become in some lobbying forums; astonishing accusations were made by some from representatives of ISPs and telecommunications companies. One speech even suggested that rightsholders want ISPs to check the content of every bit-package that comes their way to ascertain whether the copy is authorized. At its most extreme this implied that content providers want to paralyse the internet with burdensome or impossible checks. One cannot help wondering whether there is an element of deliberate misunderstanding here. Many other topics of international importance were discussed. Metadata and identifiers, rights management systems, application of law and enforcement have been the subject of numerous conferences in the UK and elsewhere. It came as no surprise that the speakers included Charles Clark, speaking on behalf of the International Publishers Copyright Council, and Norman Paskin of the International DOI Foundation. Herman Spruijt from Reed Elsevier added an STM publisher’s view (and fended off the seemingly traditional attack on academic publishers from an author), and Tarja Koskinen-Olsson (IFRRO) and Daniel Gervais (CCC) provided input on different issues from a reprographics rights organization (RRO) perspective. The most interesting workshop discussed the development of the legal protection of databases. Jörg Reinbothe, Head of the European Commission’s Copyright Unit, gave a very positive assessment of the impact of the European database directive. The first court cases in several member states had proved, in his view, that the concept of a sui generis right was working and did not create ill-balanced effects. He addressed the concern by some academic authors that they can generally no longer include selected data from other sources in their research; he expressly stated that this is not the case ‘as it only protects databases and not mere “data items”’. In the US, legislation on database pro64 The WIPO conference on electronic commerce and intellectual property