Measured progress in geneva

✍ Scribed by Stephen Saxby

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 113 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0267-3649
• DOI: 10.1016/s0267-3649(97)89739-7

✦ Synopsis

So the great event has come and gone. The Diplomatic Conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization took place in Geneva, as expected, in December. Two new international treaties were agreed upon -the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (see further p. 147). In announcing these treaties WIPO suggested they include provisions "which offer responses to the challenges of digital technology, particularly the Internet". Whether that is strictly true in the immediate aftermath of their adoption remains to be seen as agreement could not be reached on some key questions. One of these was deletion from the Copyright Treaty of the original draft Article 7 which would have made explicit that the temporary reproduction of a work was a restricted act within Article 9 of the Berne Convention. Inclusion of this provision would have meant that online use of a work that was not downloaded to the user's computer would be restricted. Such a strict approach was opposed by Internet software developers and information service providers who feared that such a restriction might, at least in theory, catch the mere act of browsing on the Internet which