Artists can copyright the content of their work. But no one can claim control of the facts upon which that work is based. The facts are public property, so to speak. That’s been the standard for copyright law in the US for more than 125 years. “Copyright is our greatest patron of the arts,” says Paul Aiken, from the Author’s Guild, the New York-based organization for book authors and journalists. “Hundreds of thousands of independent artists, musicians, and writers owe their livelihoods to copyright.”
But a proposal slated for a vote on Friday at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, if passed, would cast aside that precedent, and make copyright pirates out of authors, musicians, and Web designers. Other copyright-related provisions under consideration by the WIPO, an obscure UN agency, also have serious ramifications for the creative community.
In addition to transferring control over publicly available facts to database companies, the WIPO also seeks to define whether the World Wide Web is, in essence, a newspaper, a magazine, or a broadcast medium. If it is a broadcast medium, then all artists, writers, and musicians whose work is seen on the Web would be considered performers, just as actors or broadcasters are on television. By designating them performers, the entire relationship between artists and those who distribute their work would change. “That is tremendously important, because the only thing that can be copyrighted is the public performance of the work,” says McManus. “You wouldn’t be able to copyright the content itself.”
Dan Carlinsky, a vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, New York, says the WIPO should slow down and not adopt any of the proposals on Friday. “Things are moving way too fast in the information community,” he says. “It’s a cliché to say it is a monumental change, but it is. This is not something that can be decided in a meeting in Geneva.”
A coalition of writers groups, Web-based creative types, and other thinkers may have convinced the WIPO to rethink its position, says Barbara Simons, chairwoman of the US Public Policy Committee of ACM, the association of computing professionals. Groups like the National Academy of Sciences wrote to Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor, asking him to withdraw US support from the WIPO treaty, according to a letter obtained by Wired News. “The implications of this copyright provision are absolutely horrendous for the creative community,” says Simons.
