Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Intellectual property relates to items of information or knowledge, which can be incorporated in tangible objects at the same time in an unlimited number of copies at different locations anywhere in the world such as when hosted live on domain names. The “property” is not in those copies but in the information or knowledge
In the 1980s, this led to the United States and other developed countries “forum shifting” intellectual property standard-setting out of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which later evolved into the World Trade Organization, where the North had greater control of the agenda. This strategy paid dividends with the enactment of Agreement on Trade – Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
In October 2004, WIPO agreed to adopt a proposal offered by Argentina and Brazil, the “Proposal for the Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO” - from the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization. A number of civil society bodies have been working on a draft Access to Knowledge or A2K, Treaty which they would like to see introduced.
In 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, abbreviated as the WIPO Copyright Treaty, was an international treaty on copyright law adopted by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It provides additional protections for copyrights deemed necessary by knowledge monopoly dependent industries due to advances in information technology. There have been a variety of criticisms of this treaty, including that it is overbroad an example of its prohibition of circumvention of technical protection measures, even where such circumvention is used in the pursuit of legal and fair use rights) and it applies a “one size fits all’ standard to all signatory countries despite widely differing stages of economic development and knowledge industry.
The WIPO Copyright Treaty is implemented in the United States law by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By Decision of 16 March 2000, the European Council approved the treaty on behalf of the European Community. The WIPO Copyright Treaty made no reference to copyright in the existing terms of the Berne Convention, but there was a degree of association. The United States Congress passed both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which enacts copyright term extension during the same week and used the same method using voice vote to make it less, the European Union adopted its own copyright term extension around the same time.