Trade experts are racing against the clock to come up with
an
Information Technology Agreement (ITA) to serve as the
crowning
achievement of the Singapore meeting. If approved, the
agreement
would significantly reduce, perhaps even nullify,
tariffs for the US$500
billion (Bt12.5 trillion) annual trade in computer hardware
products.
But several new proposals concerning intellectual property
rights,
currently under debate in Geneva, could soon make it much
more
difficult to use copyrighted material on the Internet
and computer
programs, especially if these rules become part of the
WTO's
Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement.
The one feature these two trends have in common, note critics,
is
that they would increase the profits of corporations -
many of whom are
based in the US - which sell IT products.
''Intellectual property rights are being expanded into
new areas and
new fields," says Carlos Correa, a professor at the University
of
Buenos Aires. ''Th is runs against the fundamental principle
that
knowledge is a good thing and should be kept in the public
domain."
Among the issues currently being studied by negotiators
in Geneva, he
said, is a proposal that would expand protection to make
even the
temporary loading of computer programs an infringement
of copyright.
In other words, users who download a program from the
Internet to
test it, no matter how briefly, may have to pay
for it, even if they
decide they don't want to use it.
Another proposal would do away with the current right to
freely use
copyrighted material for private or non-commercial use,
according to
Correa. Internet users, for instance, would not be able
to copy
published articles and post them onto discussion forums,
at least not
without paying. Even factual material could be subject
to these new
rules, said Correa.
The South American academic cited a recent case in which
a publisher
sued the oil company Texaco for copyright infringement,
and won,
because one of the firm's engineers had made copies of
a technical
article in a journal and passed them around to his colleagues.
The
court reportedly ruled that the company should instead
have bought a
subscription for each of its engineers.
The new rules were proposed before the Geneva-based UN
World
Intellectual Property Organisation in February of this
year, and are
already being debated in the conference being held there
this month.
They could be incorporated into the TRIPS agreement when
it is
reviewed in the year 2000.
Correa said that one of the European Union's reasons for
supporting
these new rules is the fact that there is now technology
available to
record who has made copies of data from Internet sites.
''Contrary to popular belief," he adds, ''The Internet
actually makes
it much easier to monitor who is using copyrighted material."
Correa said that both the EU and the United States are
pushing the
new rules, but that there are also opponents in
these countries,
particularly among the scientific community. Public librarians
are
also starting to oppose the new intellectual property
rules, which
would essentially turn them into fee collectors for database
publishers.