acknowledged. Technology will have to evolve to support the
authorization process."

Alain Bron is a consultant in information systems and a
novelist. He wrote in November 1999: "I regard the web today as
a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright
on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything
original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not
formally registered or if works are available without payment
facilities. A solution is to make people pay for information,
but this is no watertight guarantee against it being copied."

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 m