Business leaders try to chart future of booming Internet business

Hundreds of government and business leaders began a meeting in Geneva Tuesday to discuss Internet commerce, which has been growing rapidly despite a major debate in various industries about copyright piracy.

Hundreds of government and business leaders began a meeting in Geneva Tuesday to discuss Internet commerce, which has been growing rapidly despite a major debate in various industries about copyright piracy.

The 700 government, business and technology leaders attending the three-day meeting — organized by the U.N. copyright agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization — are particularly focussing on such products as music, software and movies, which can be downloaded directly over the Internet.

The session tries to find a way to regulate fledgling electronic commerce without strangling it.

U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley said in his opening address that African singers and Madonna, for instance, stand to gain from rapidly growing trade on the Internet — but only if their rights are protected.

“Today consumers can go to a record store in Washington and buy Madonna, but maybe not find the music of African singers,” Daley said. “Yet with the Internet, suddenly African singers’ works are available, and suddenly these artists could sell music to people everywhere.”

But, Daley added, a way must be found to make sure the world protects the rights of the creators of music, movies and software sold through so-called “e-commerce.”

“If somebody pirates a Madonna CD and sells it on the street, Madonna will lose some royalties, no question about it,” he said. “But the person hurting more would be the local artist, who might have been able to sell a legitimate record if the pirated Madonna had not been so cheap.”

And if a performer can get a foothold locally, he or she will stand a chance of selling on the Internet, he said. That is what has happened in countries that have stopped pirating of international artists: their local performers’ share of their markets has grown greatly.

“Electronic commerce takes place on the global, borderless medium of the Internet,” a WIPO statement noted, adding that much of the buying and selling takes place between companies or individuals in two different countries, thus coming outside the usual national laws for commerce.

WIPO has been campaigning to protect trademarks against abuse on the Internet, and has fostered development of a new system for assigning the World Wide Web addresses, or “domain names,” to prevent misuse of corporate identification.

Top officials of the recording and movie industries will be among those presenting their cases to representatives of WIPO’s 171 member nations who are drafting a plan of action for protecting intellectual property in electronic commerce.

Officials said it was too soon to say whether the governments would decide a treaty was the best approach or whether they would simply create a set of recommendations to each nation.

From staff and wire reports.