World Copyright Treaty Coming soon

ebresie writes: "According to an article in Info World, the World Intellectual Property Organization indicates that the WIPO Copyright Treaty is scheduled to go into effect in March of 2002. The treaty "is designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media." It also makes reference of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty which "specifically protects the digital-media rights of producers and performers of sound recordings"." This is not a "new" treaty; rather it's the old one, which says much the same thing as the DMCA and was used to justify the passage of the DMCA. Now the same provisions will be in effect across many countries.

Comments

GPL - for other works

[eclectric]

Could the GPL be extended to, say, artistic works? That way an artist could simply copyright(copyleft) his or her works and therefore bypass these kinds of inane copyright laws. Granted, one could simply make their works public domain, but you still would need some public protections. (Like, you might want to make your stuff freely available, but you don't want others taking credit for it. Or, you just might not want anyone else to make money off of it either.)

Any thoughts?