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.
