The World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, abbreviated as the WIPO Copyright Treaty or WCT, is an international treaty on copyright law adopted by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1996. It provides additional protections for copyright deemed necessary due to advances in information technology since the formation of previous copyright treaties before it. It ensures that computer programs are protected as literary works (Article 4), and that the arrangement and selection of material in databases is protected (Article 5). It provides authors of works with control over their rental and distribution in Articles 6 to 8 which they may not have under the Berne Convention alone. It also prohibits circumvention of technological measures for the protection of works (Article 11) and unauthorized modification of rights management information contained in works (Article 12).
There have been a variety of criticisms of this treaty, including that it is too broad (for example in its prohibition of circumvention of technical protection measures, even where such circumvention is used in the pursuit of legal and fair use rights) and that it applies a 'one size fits all' standard to all signatory countries despite widely differing stages of economic development and knowledge industry.
Read more about World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty: Implementation
Famous quotes containing the words world, intellectual, property, organization and/or treaty:
“You are a thousand times a properer man
Than she a woman. ‘Tis such fools as you
That makes the world full of ill-favored children.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Be militant each in your own way.... I incite this meeting to rebellion.”
—Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“It is accordance with our determination to refrain from aggression and build up a sentiment and practice among nations more favorable to peace ... that we have incurred the consent of fourteen important nations to the negotiation of a treaty condemning recourse to war, renouncing it as an instrument of national policy.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)