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The issue of who owns what on the
internet is a complex one. Like obscenity laws, copyright laws differ from
country to country, making regulation on the internet difficult. The
internet has also thrown up some new and effectively ungovernable ways of
distributing copyrighted material. A good example is the mp3 music
format, which allows owners of cds to copy and distribute cd-quality
audio files by e-mail, on websites and especially using p2p
programs with little change of being tracked down and prosecuted.
Organisations
such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation (wipo), a UN agency and
a forum for discussion and arbitration of copyright issues, have tried to
garner support for new global copyright schemes, in particular
protecting the content of databases and the copies of material made
during transmission over the internet. Other initiatives, such as the
Strategic Digital Music Initiative (sdmi), established by the music industry
to prevent piracy of its works, have underestimated the resourcefulness of
the net community and alternative approaches are being considered.
Finding and prosecuting every copyright infringement on the net is
an impossible task. In a world where intangible assets such as copyright
have become more and important to businesses, you can be sure that
legislation will become tougher and copyright holders more aggressive in
protecting their intellectual property. But to what effect: in the United
States, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, originally designed to
protect works such as dvds, may have curtailed the use of napster
by music pirates, but other file-sharing networks continue to thrive.
Many argue that the big copyright owners should adapt to the new
internet world rather than use the legislative club to fight it. Much
better, they say, to develop new and imaginative distribution mechanisms
which might persuade people to pay for their intellectual property. By
strangling resources such as internet radio and surreptitiously attempting
to corrupt file-sharing networks, it is argued, organisations such as the
Recording Industry Association of America (riaa) have made more enemies than
friends. |
