Guide to copyright and intellectual property legislation on electronic information exchange
The Open Information Interchange (OII) Guide to Intellectual Property Rights for Electronic Interchange has recently been published. The OII is a service within the EU's programme for the development of a European multimedia content industry (INFO2000), which aims to provide an overview of existing and emerging standards and industry specifications designed to facilitate the exchange of information in an electronic form. For this purpose, a set of interlinking publications have been introduced, the focal publication being the OII Standards and Specifications list. The present guide, a part of the series of complementary publications on standards and specifications, seeks to highlight some of the key points relating to the application of copyright and intellectual property rights legislation in the context of electronic information exchange. Whilst the guide does not provide an authoritative source of information on national copyright laws, it has been compiled since there are currently no agreed standards in this area. The guide therefore concentrates on the laws that will underpin any future technical solutions developed for the electronic protection of intellectual property rights. It addresses the following topics: - The Berne Convention for the protection of literary and artistic works; - The WIPO Copyright Treaty (not yet ratified); - International legislation for the protection of audiovisual data; - Overview of the current legislative situation in Europe; - Overview of the current legislative situation in the USA.