WIPO Director General, Francis Gurry Discusses Digital Content Copyright Challenges


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Francis GurryWIPO Director General

A new Movie coming soon to cinemas. You go online and find it available for free. Click. Enter. Download. Watch. But is it that simple?

Floating in cyberspace are millions and millions of web pages that contain all sorts of content - be it images, videos or simply just text. But with all the abundance of information online, content copyrights are not equally preserved, or as some might put it, not easy to control. The recent ITU TELECOM WORLD 2009 re-opened the debatable topic of intellectual property and content copyrights online, recognizing it is one of the most fundamental ICT topics to date.
 
In the Conference's Official Joint Opening Forum, Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) spoke of the challenges associated with content copyrights and the societal role towards leveraging the protection granted to e-content copyrights. IctQATAR had this exclusive interview with Gurry in Geneva during the conference. The whole video interview can be seen at this link.

Can you first tell us about how you think we can protect content online and what role should different members of society play?

I think it's really very important to protect content online because we cannot take advantage of this enormous power of Information and Communication Technology unless we have something to share on. And that means we have to find means of rewarding creators, rewarding performers - in other words the content providers. How do we do that? Usually by protecting intellectual property, by protecting the copyright system. There are certain security measures that can be used. When I think about the different role that should be played by members of society, what we have to do here is to ensure that everyone has a consciousness that what's really at stake here is the question of financing culture in the 21st century and in the digital environment.

We all want books. We all want music. We all want films. And in order to get them, however, we have to pay the content creators.

Working in the field of copyright protection, what challenges are you currently facing?

Putting it in broader spaces, the biggest challenge is the technological obsolescence of the legal model. The legal model, that we had, worked very well for the analog world, where you had a book or a CD or a DVD which was a convenient vehicle for collecting the royalty to return to creators. Now in the contain-less world of the Internet, I think the world is still experimenting with various models that would work. Usually subscription models [are used] whereby they make available a whole library of content for a relatively small per unit, per capita price.

With the booming use of ICT, do you think that can reinforce copyright protection, or is actually a threat to it?

I think content providers have to work together with the technologists, those who are providing and developing Information and Communication technologies. It is very important to see this partnership because it is in the interest of both. It is in the interest of content providers to have the much greater distributional possibilities that the new technologies provide, and it's also in the interest of those providing ICTs to ensure they have a very rich content to be able to distribute.

With pirated content that is being downloaded online cheaply, how can you convince youth to use copyrighted material and refrain from pirated one?

Well, I don't think you can compete with ""Free""! That's the problem. And for as long as it's free, there is no means for competing with that and nothing will be returned to the creators or performers. So this is not the model that works; you have to pay for content. But people are prepared to pay for content - you have people who pay subscriptions for different sorts of Television services and they're used to that. I think it's just that we had an intervening period of 10 or 15 years where music was downloaded free and we had to educate the public to a point where they understand that it is in their long term interest to pay something to ensure a vibrant music culture.

In the panel discussion, held at the conference, you mentioned that we need to achieve a balance between the incentivization of content creation and the diffusion of it. Can you please elaborate?

I think that we have seen that as a result of ICTs and lowering the price of the availability of content - which is very good - and that's being brought about in part because the audience is enlarged by so much. Now the whole world is the audience and that enables us to lower the unit cost. It is very important for content providers to take advantage of that, because if they charge prices that are too high, we are going to see a situation in which we will be destroying the incentive for people to participate in paying the creators.

How do you look at the issue of content copyright in light of social media that are becoming more and more popular nowadays?

It's the same problem, I think subscription models are one way of doing it. I think making content available on terms that are reasonable and ensure widespread diffusion is another way of doing it. I am non partial to the notion that libraries become available but against payment.

By: Mina Nagy

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ictQATAR will be running regular features from the ITU TELECOM WORLD 2009 conference, with exclusive stories and interviews from the conference. Follow the exclusive video coverage on ictQATAR's YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/ictQATAR.






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