Copyright: An International Issue

The No. 1 export of the United States isn't food or machinery or some other durable good. It's copyrighted material: music, movies, software, published works and so on. By the late 1990s, copyrighted material contributed $400 BILLION a year to the national economy

Not coincidentally, copyright is one of the few areas in which international law exists, primarily because of economic interests in global markets for creative works. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the key organization involved in international copyright law.

In Issues in Cyberspace, Samoriski highlights some concerns:

Commercial interests have taken the lead in making sure that any products or services they place on the Internet are protected by international law.

When an international regulatory body (such as WIPO) creates the rules, it may create problems by violating the rights of citizens in individual nations … such as fair use or First Amendment rights in the United States.
Foreign governments are concerned about how Western domination of global copyright policies will affect them. They need foreign investment and expertise, but they also want to maintain their own political, social and cultural sovereignty.

In "The New Global Media" (in Living in the Info Age), McChesney describes how trans-national corporations increasingly control media around the world. Although he does not specifically discuss copyright, it's not a big leap to understand why companies would be extremely interested in protecting their ownership rights in media content when ...

A very small number of media giants worldwide own both the content and the means to distribute it (through "vertical integration" of complementary products) ...

... And their best chance of increasing profits is to expand into other nations ...

... And corporate or commercial interests are of greater importance than any issues encompassed by national borders. The products themselves may be local (music is a good example), but the companies are not. International copyright laws are thus necessary (at least from the corporate perspective) to allow maximum profit across borders, regardless of where the content itself originates.

Beyond these corporate issues, copyright is a challenging legal issue in a global online environment for a variety of reasons, including:

The ease with which digital copies can be made and disseminated around the world, instantly.

The perfection of digital copies. There is virtually no loss of quality from the original, which makes a copy made for personal use indistinguishable from a million additional copies made for profit.

The fact that, here again, technology is outpacing the law. Both national and international laws exist -- and are generally getting stronger -- but enforcing them is a whole other matter. Options include...

* Making legal penalties for piracy severe enough to serve as an effective deterrent
* Exploring technical solutions, such as using encryption, digital watermarks or other computer to make copying difficult if not impossible.

Back here at home...
Congress must ratify international treaties before the United States can become a party to them. In the 1990s, Congress went one better (or worse, depending on your perspective). It didn't just update existing copyright law to conform to international standards. It passed whole new acts.

* The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 significantly extended copyright protection for digital products, notably by making it a crime to even try to get around digital copyright protections (the “anti-circumvention provision”).

* Another significant new law (with the silly name of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) has extended the length of time before creative works enter the public domain -- notably benefiting the Disney company and Mickey Mouse, among others. (This law was challenged in court on grounds that it significantly limited material that otherwise would be part of the public domain. But the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Act in 2003.)

* Yet another new law (the No Electronic Theft, or NET, Act) increased the criminal penalties for copyright violators, even if no financial gain is involved.

* And the laws continue to get tougher. Just last summer, for instance, the Senate began considering the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights (or INDUCE) Act. It targets anyone who "intentionally induces any violation" of copyright ... for instance, companies that make peer-to-peer software. Critics fear that commonly used tools, such as CD ripping and burning software, could be prosecuted for "intentionally inducing" copyright violations under such a law (which, to my knowledge, has not yet been enacted).

It's a Small World After All?