UNESCO instrumental in setting up universal copyright standards, struggled at a symposium in Madrid last week to find similar protection for authors as their works spread across the Internet.
The gathering of artists, authors, copyright lawyers and technical experts debated whether and how to compensate authors and producers in an increasingly digital world where creations can easily be copied and distributed.
"Even eight to 10 year olds who have their own magazine on the Internet can understand the concept of copyright and they want to know how to protect their work," said Edward Valauskas of the International Federation of Libraries in The Hague.
UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) charged the four day symposium with providing a neutral forum to reach consensus on the issue, which has already sparked controversy in several countries.
Some of the proposed safeguards for authors in cyberspace have drawn fire for apparently advocating the restriction of the free flow of information.
"We are in the midst of a total revolution, and as human beings we are not prepared for such exponential changes, one local author attending the forum said. "We have to look at things in a different way."
The worry among artists and intellectuals is that copyright protection will become more of a right for corporations than individuals as the Internet is transformed into a commercial entity from its roots as an electronic messaging system.
Thomas Dreier of Germany's Max Planck Institute said the rights protection working group he moderated was having trouble defining who should hold rights and what should be protected.
A computer message between two people on the Internet could be thought of like a private lefter, he explained, but it might enter the public domain and require protection if it was copied, distributed and discussed in a network forum.
"Right now everyone wants to protect their market share and their future market share, but because we are not defining them, the market shares will probably add up to more than 100 per cent," Dreier said.
Another difficulty emerging from the debate was how much of a piece of creative work should be protected whether copyright should apply to an entire opera or just a bar of music.
Coded copyright information could be attached to digital copies of works, aiding authors and publishers in collecting compensation and tracking down infringements, but the question of what part of the work should be coded still remains.
The main consensus at the symposium was that the changes caused by the merging information industries and their distribution on the Internet were happening so quickly that any regulation was likely to lag behind reality.
. Microsoft Ireland launched its "Sherlock Holmes campaign" last week, to reduce software copyright infringements in this country. It has set up a freephone hotline (1850-630-630) for customers buying software who on closer investigation believe it to be pirated. The estimated loss of revenue to the Irish software sector was $40 million in 1994 in Ireland, according to Ann Riordan, Microsoft Ireland's country manager.