Peter Raggett was the deputy-head (and now the head) of the OECD Central Library (OECD: Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development). He wrote in August 1999: "The copyright question is still very unclear. Publishers naturally want their fees for each article ordered and librarians and end-users want to be able to download immediately the full text of articles. At the moment, each publisher seems to have its own policy for access to electronic versions and they would benefit from having some kind of homogenous policy, preferably allowing unlimited downloading of their electronic material."
Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October 2000: "Copyright is a difficult issue. The owner of the intellectual property thinks that s/he owns what s/he has created. I believe that the consumer purchases the piece of plastic (in the case of a CD) or the bounded pages (in the case of book). The business community has not found a new way to add value to intellectual property. Consumers don't think very abstractly. When they download songs for example, they are simply listening to them, they are not possessing them. The music and publishing industry need to find ways to give consumers tactile vehicles for selling the intellectual property."
= Copyright and WIPO
Since the web became mainstream, the posting by the thousands of electronic texts and other documents has been an headache for organizations in charge of applying the rules relating to intellectual property.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an intergovernmental organization, and one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations. It is responsible for protecting intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among countries. It is also responsible for implementing various multilateral treaties dealing with the legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property.
Intellectual property comprises industrial property and copyright. Industrial property relates to inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and appellations of origin. Copyright relates to literary, musical, artistic, photographic and audiovisual works. WIPO stated on its website in 1999: "As regards the number of literary and artistic works created worldwide, it is difficult to make a precise estimate. However, the information available indicates that at present around 1,000,000 books/titles are published and some 5,000 feature films are produced in a year, and the number of copies of phonograms sold per year presently is more than 3,000 million."
Copyright protection means that using a copyrighted work is lawful only if we get authorization from the copyright owner. As explained by WIPO on its website in the section "International Protection of Copyright and Neighbouring Rights", the authorizations granted by the copyright owner can be: "The right to copy or otherwise reproduce any kind of work; the right to distribute copies to the public; the right to rent copies of at least certain categories of works (such as computer programs and audiovisual works); the right to make sound recordings of the performances of literary and musical works; the right to perform in public, particularly musical, dramatic or audiovisual works; the right to communicate to the public by cable or otherwise the performances of such works and, particularly, to broadcast, by radio, television or other wireless means, any kind of work; the right to translate literary works; the right to rent, particularly, audiovisual works, works embodied in phonograms and computer programs; the right to adapt any kind of work and particularly the right to make audiovisual works thereof."
Under some national laws, some of these rights - which together are referred to as "economic rights" - are not exclusive rights of authorization but, in some specific cases, merely rights to remuneration. In addition to economic rights, authors - whether or not they own the economic rights - enjoy "moral rights" on the basis of which authors have the right to claim their authorship and require that their names be indicated on the copies of the work and in connection with other uses, and they have the right to oppose the mutilation or deformation of their works.
= Shrinking of public domain
Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them for free. In 2009, Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of downloads every day. As recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I knew [in July 1971] that the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The Information Age.' That was also the day I said we would be able to carry quite literally the entire Library of Congress in one hand and the system would certainly make it illegal… too much power to leave in the hands of the masses."