Thursday, November 4, 1999

Council's Report on Copyright Discusses Issues Without Settling Any By WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ Washington The right of reproduction was debated Wednesday in a briefing at the National Research Council. But the discussion was not about abortion -- it was about copyright. The occasion was the release of a report by the council, "Digital Dilemma: Intellectual A new framework may be needed within copyright law to determine not whether a copy has been made, but whether the use of a work was consistent with the author's creative incentive. Property in the Information Age." The document spotlights the different perspectives on copyright among scholars, publishers, lawyers, and representatives of the technology industry. The report -- almost two years in the writing -- was intended to bring together different points of view, said Randall Davis, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is chairman of the Committee on Intellectual Property Rights and the Emerging Information Infrastructure, which issued the findings. "The report sets a foundation and a framework to think out the problems of intellectual property in the digital age across disciplines," he said. But the report comes a full year after Congress's decision to extend the term of copyright, and it does not discuss copyright-related issues in data-base legislation that is now being considered. Some of those in the audience who follow copyright closely said they were disappointed by the report's repeated calls for additional study of contentious issues. Perhaps the most striking portion of the report, copyright experts said, was a question posed in its final pages: "Is 'copy' still the appropriate foundational concept for copyright law in the digital age?" The committee suggests that where digital information is concerned, legitimate copies are made so routinely -- not to mention that non-infringing copies are made in many formats for archival and back-up purposes -- that the mere act of copying tells a regulator little about the "legitimacy of the behavior." In a digital world, the committee said, a new framework may be needed within copyright law to determine not whether a copy has been made, but whether the use of a work is consistent with the author's creative incentive. "That is a very exciting question," said Scott Bennett, a librarian at Yale University, who said he enjoyed reading the report. "Perhaps the right to control reproduction may not be the best way to protect rights themselves in the digital age." Mr. Davis, the committee's chairman, emphasized that the committee was not recommending "throwing rights out the door," but just asking whether there was a better way to think about copyrights in the digital age. Currently, he said, economists, lawyers, private and public librarians, academics, information scientists, members of the publishing and entertainment worlds, and high-tech industrialists discuss copyright separately, taking narrow views of issues that affect everyone. The 18 members of the committee represent institutions as diverse as Wired magazine and the Queens Borough Public Library. The report notes many areas of disagreement. There was "a very spirited discussion" whenever the group met, said Karen Hunter, senior vice-president of Reed Elsevier Science, Inc. The report suggests using new business models to manage some intellectual-property issues. Some models are already proliferating on line: Some scholarly material and some software-demonstration programs are freely distributed. Site licenses protect material used repeatedly by libraries and universities. Also popular are modest payments for each electronic use of material or for time spent using a particular resource. Other models combine advertising and subscription revenue with per-item or time-based usage fees. The report discusses a number of other issues, including the difficulty of distinguishing illegal copying from extensive copying for personal use. But on this issue, as with many others, the report merely calls for further study. A summary of the report is currently available on line. The full text is expected to be available on line later this week. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article