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Subject: IP: Sunday WP Editorial on WIPO Treaty
Sunday's Washington Post Editorial on WIPO treaty. jamie Public Data or Private Data? Sunday, November 3 1996; Page C06 The Washington Post THE INTERNET WAS initially expected to usher in a world where untold riches of information would be available at the touch of a button to vastly more people than ever before. But as the legal and commercial framework of this once-structureless medium begins to take shape, it has become clear that a few mistakes could lead to just the opposite state of affairs -- a world in which once-public information sources of every kind could be converted to proprietary commercial resources, available not to taxpayers or library-goers (whose taxes may have financed the information's collection) but only to paying customers. The immediate occasion of this worry is a proposal now headed, not for Congress, but for an international conference on intellectual property issues this December in Geneva. The proposal, one of a batch of possible amendments to existing international copyright treaties that will be debated at the meeting, would give private companies that distribute data electronically -- including those that contract with state or national governments to do so with public data -- much greater controls than they now have over the "reproduction or utilization" of the data in those databases. In some cases, that means that any attempt to do research by compiling material out of a database -- looking up names and addresses, for instance, or consulting public environmental databases or property valuations -- could run afoul of copyright protections. The underlying problem, as always with the Internet, is that you cannot "utilize" most data (that is, read it) without making an electronic copy of it for your own machine. The legal status of such "copies" remains hotly contested, with some researchers raising fears that -- unless the law is cleaned up -- you could violate copyright simply by browsing a Web site. The database issue also raises wider questions of who actually owns publicly compiled data and what constitutes "creative" work in compiling it. Databases come in many shapes, sizes and flavors, from the telephone directory to "value-added" databases such as searchable government document files or newspaper or picture archives. (For the record, we note that The Washington Post Co. owns and distributes data of these kinds.) Under current law, databases with "added value" get protection on the basis that their compilation and presentation amounts to creative expression: You cannot, for instance, copy a page of a newspaper's classified ads to someone's Web site and sell access to it to third parties. But unlike expression and presentation of facts, facts themselves are not protected. A case involving a telephone directory concluded no protection was possible. Then there are also borderline cases, such as that of West Publishing Co., which distributes federal court decisions with the addition only of corrections and page numbers. West was recently blocked from claiming monopoly distribution rights of that material -- public, of course -- merely on the basis of those additions. Many more such matters are under consideration. The main concern about the Geneva meeting is that an international treaty could radically shift all these balances without even being weighed in Congress. The administration, and particularly the Commerce Department, which has generally supported taking such issues directly to Geneva, should insist instead on first airing the public's interests in access to information here at home.
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