Copyright Contretemps
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (SEPTEMBER 2001)
When
federal agents in Las Vegas hauled poor Dmitry Sklyarov
off to jail on July 16 for hacking into Adobe’s
ebook software, the 26-year-old Russian’s arrest proved
a disastrous outing for the much-maligned Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA), the 1998 law under which Sklyarov
was detained. As hackers and civil libertarians lined
up to blast the act’s restrictions upon sharing information
about cyber security, the whole episode (including Adobe’s
about-face when it decided prosecuting Sklyarov wasn’t
such a hot idea) highlighted the fine line publishers
must tread when protecting copyright across international
boundaries in the digital age.
Not mentioned amid the contretemps was the organization
well suited to puzzle out such issues, the Geneva-based
International Publishers Association, which among
other duties is charged with monitoring the implementation
of the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright
Treaty, ratified in the US as part of the DMCA. Established
in 1896, the IPA now has 77 member organizations in
66 countries — among them the Association of American
Publishers in the US — and has been exercising stealth
diplomacy to forge a chain of enforceable but fair-minded
copyright laws around the globe.
“The
chain will be no stronger than its weakest link,” says
Richard Rudick of Wiley and Sons, who
chairs the IPA’s Copyright Committee. “In this context
the IPA has a unique role to play. It is the only body
which acts as a forum of publishers of educational material
and literature throughout the world.” No other publisher
organization, he adds, is able to facilitate contacts
between the so-called developed world and parts of Asia,
Africa and South America — potentially lucrative regions
for American publishers, but regions primed for piracy
as well.
And that’s where the IPA comes in. “The economic importance
of copyright has long been recognized, but its international
dimension has increased through the Internet,” IPA President
Pere Vicens notes. Besides helping governments
draft copyright legislation, the IPA is working to protect
databases, as well as “traditional knowledge and cultural
expressions” such as folklore. “The protection of both
databases and cultural expressions poses complex legal
and political problems,” says Carlo Scollo Lavizzari,
legal counsel to the IPA. “As publishers may be both
creators and disseminators of databases and such expressions,
protecting them is of direct concern to IPA members.”
The group is also reviewing jurisdiction for international
disputes, an abstract legal matter that has become quite
concrete for Sklyarov. While the legal wrangling over
his fate continues, it might be worth remembering that
progress does happen, however fitfully. Twenty years
ago, then-IPA president Per Sjögren rebuked the
Soviet Union after it banned South Korea from the Second
Moscow International Book Fair, denied a visa to Random
House’s Robert Bernstein, and banned more
than 40 American books from the show. (Due to the changes
in Russian society since perestroika, the Russian
Book Publishers Association was admitted as a full
member of IPA in October 1994.) Among the titles confiscated
by Soviet authorities at the time — and one likely to
strike Sklyarov’s supporters as rather ironic — was
George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
©2001
Publishing Trends
