USIA - Text: Bruce Lehman on New Intellectual Property Treaties, 97-04-04

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TEXT: BRUCE LEHMAN ON NEW INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TREATIES

(WIPO pacts go far to protect rights in digital age) (6270)

The WIPO Copyright Treaty supplements the century-old Berne Convention by clarifying that the digital transmission and distribution of literary or artistic works -- works historically protected by the Convention -- will now receive copyright protection, Lehman said in an April 2 speech to the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association.

This treaty also harmonizes standards by helping to reconcile differences between the U.S. and European copyright protection systems.

The second pact, the WIPO Treaty on Performances and Phonograms includes harmonization provisions that "are even more profound," according to Lehman, because the accord represents the first global effort to protect the exploitation of sound recordings by means other than simple physical reproduction.

Given the pace of technological advances, the two pacts "could not be more important nor more timely," the commissioner said.

More than 160 countries participated in the Geneva discussions that led to the treaties, and Lehman stressed that enthusiasm was not limited to major producers of intellectual property like the United States, the European Union, India, South Africa and Japan.

"Even countries that do not have large copyright-based industries had significant input into the treaties because they saw that strong copyright protection was in their national economic interests," he said.

"We are only now beginning to see the Internet and international electronic commerce develop. There is a huge potential for growth and I would say the principal reason these new technologies have not been used thus far is precisely because of inadequate intellectual property protection globally," Lehman added.

The commissioner's remarks covered extensive ground, including background on international copyright issues and examples of legal problems that will be clarified by the new treaties once they enter into force. Two areas not covered by the pacts -- protection of "sui generis" databases and rights of audiovisual performers -- will be studied further by WIPO, Lehman said.

Following are extended excerpts from the text of Lehman's remarks, as prepared for delivery.

(Note: In the text "billion" means 1,000 million)

(begin text)

I know that as soon as international organizations dealing with intellectual property are mentioned, the subject matter is often thought of being so technical that most people, even lawyers, immediately tend to think they have entered an exclusive forum, access to which is restricted to copyright or telecommunications experts. While it is true that the new treaties are technical in a sense, the subject has far broader implications and impacts far more people than only the limited group of copyright experts. I think that all of us as legal practitioners and judges, indeed, all of us in modern society, are going to have to become acquainted with what the recent Diplomatic Conference did, because, simply put, we are living in the age of digital information and entertainment systems, in a digital environment to use a new catchphrase, and the treaties adopted in Geneva, I believe, will become important cornerstones of, not only international intellectual property law, but of international economic law for the information and technological age of the 21st Century...

One of the principal tensions in international trade has been over intellectual property because one of the principal trade problems of the world is massive piracy of intellectual property. If we are going to have a meaningful global trading system that will produce wealth for everyone in the world, and if technologically advanced nations are to be able to buy agricultural and manufacturing products from emerging ones, then we must be able to market information, entertainment, and high-technology products on a global basis with the reasonable expectation of receiving payment for such products and services.

That, by way of background, is what the new WIPO treaties are really about. Pure information products have always been protected by the copyright law. Virtually everyone in the world is involved in the information industry in some way, either as a producer or consumer of information. So, we must have a global legal system supporting the digital electronic marketplace which allows for the proper functioning of free market forces. This can only happen if intellectual property rights are protected. Under copyright law, as it existed before these treaties, you have global protection because of the century-old Berne Convention on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. That treaty has worked well for many years to foster and sustain a global publishing industry, and more recently motion-picture industries and various other kinds of uses of information products and entertainment products.

However, we have reached an era now in which there are many other outlets, other than the printed page or a theater stage or a cinema, for the exploitation of works of the human mind and for information products. We have computer programs. We have a wide variety of electronic entertainment media. And now we are evolving into the age of the Internet, when products can be marketed and delivered digitally in electronic form instantaneously to users of all kinds on a global basis at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse.

This new global digital network environment creates special problems and special strains on the traditional system of copyright or "droits d'auteur." One of the strains is that national boundaries -- even though they've always been difficult to recognize in intellectual property -- become almost meaningless in the digital world. The Internet functions in many countries. A work of authorship distributed on the Internet may, in the course of a few seconds, travel from a server in New York to servers in Tokyo, Capetown, Stockholm or Beijing. And it is almost impossible for an individual nation, going it alone, to either assert any kind of national control over that product, or likewise, to protect the intellectual property rights that are represented by it.

And that's why representatives of 160 nations, large and small, assembled in Geneva in December 1996 at a Diplomatic Conference convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). What was immediately striking to me was the fact that virtually all of the attendees recognized the pressing need to have a new legal regime to carry forward into the digital age those basic principles derived from the Berne Convention and other treaties and national laws modeled after it, such as the neighboring rights laws of European countries that protect the sound recording industries.

So what exactly happened? The Diplomatic Conference produced two treaties: the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Treaty on Performances and Phonograms. Though lacking a certain sexiness in their unitarian titles, the substance of the treaties could not be more important nor more timely.

The principal feature of the WIPO Copyright Treaty is its supplementation of the Berne Convention by clarifying that the digital transmission and distribution of a literary or artistic work -- of the kind historically protected under the Berne Convention -- will now be protected under this new treaty. Another important aspect of this treaty is that, for the first time, it will help us reconcile the different legal systems under which copyrights on both sides of the Atlantic have been protected. Europe has known the "droits d'auteur" system -- the authors' rights system -- for about 200 years, and the United States has had a copyright system that we derived from our English common law origins. There have been some very important differences in those two systems. One difference, for example, is that in the United States we have not historically recognized some of the rights that are in the European system. Another is that the United States' system has been much more commercially oriented than the Continental system. The new WIPO Copyright Treaty builds a bridge between those two systems, while also preserving concepts of "fair use" exceptions for educational, scientific and research uses of works.

In the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, the harmonization aspects are even more profound. Although the United States and some other countries protect sound recordings under copyright law, in no European country -- and in the majority of countries in the world -- sound recordings are protected under an entirely different legal regime called Neighboring Rights. There is no existing treaty to which a majority of the countries of the world adhere, including the United States, which provides for the protection of rights in anything other than the right of physical reproduction. Now, with the Treaty on Performances and Phonograms, there will be a treaty that I expect the United States, and by far the majority of countries in the world, will sign which will, for the first time, protect on a global basis the exploitation of sound recordings by means other than simple physical reproduction.

This comes at an extremely important moment in history. I think most people who look at the music industry believe -- and we don't know exactly how the market will evolve -- that we are on the threshold of a period in which what we now think of as a sound recording that you buy at a record store will be obtainable through your computer or through a device that may resemble your television set, but that will receive digital signals and will in effect "download" for you a copy, perhaps across long distances, perhaps across national boundaries, and you won't have to go down to a Tower Records or the Wherehouse to buy a disc of any kind. Not a vinyl disc, not a compact disc, not an audiocassette, not a DAT. You'll be able to receive and listen to something digitally when you want it and where you want it. Music on demand literally. And now we have a treaty that protects that commercial eventuality.

The pursuit and conclusion of these two treaties has been a high priority of my mine, and frankly, we think the work we did over the last few years in preparation for this landmark Diplomatic Conference has proven to be, despite some criticism from some quarters, very successful and productive. And I have to say I'm personally very gratified that WIPO has been successful in this work.

The TRIPS agreement was one of the most contentious aspects of the Uruguay Round and it was negotiated in a context in which countries used chits to trade with one another. If you were an intellectual-property-producing country you could say, "We're not going to permit your agricultural goods to receive better tariff treatment unless you protect our intellectual property." In this recent WIPO exercise, we had no such quid-pro-quos. This was not a question of trading one country's interests against another. And I have to say it was quite remarkable and a testament to the changed environment in the post-Uruguay Round world that nearly 160 countries were able to come together and not a single one of them was interested in blocking the treaty, stopping something from happening, even if they were not countries that produced intellectual property. That is not to say Geneva was some love-fest or mutual admiration club, since there were certainly differences of opinion expressed by different countries as to how best to create the treaties. But what was notable and remarkable, in my opinion, was that there was a common interest expressed by all participating countries in establishing fair and equitable rules for protecting intellectual property rights.

Now, having laid out for you the context for why these treaties are so important, let me turn to addressing some of the more prevalent and substantive questions about the treaties.

The first is the debate, and eventual deletion from the text of the treaty, proposed language dealing with the right of reproduction. I talked about the Berne Convention, and the difference between the Berne Convention and the new WIPO Copyright Law Treaty. The Berne Convention has always protected reproduction of a copyrighted work. That's one of the essential features of the Berne Convention, and the essential right of the Berne Convention.

Let me give you an example from the motion picture industry. We've seen many movies about Napoleon. "War and Peace" has been made into a film a number of times by a number of different filmmakers. Each one of the film versions of "War and Peace" has a separate copyright. On the other hand, if you were to pirate a version of "War and Peace" just to make copies of it and distribute it, you would be violating the copyright right. That is the right of reproduction and it is well-established in the Berne Convention. If that had been the sole reason to go to Geneva, we wouldn't have gone. When the initial drafts of the treaty were created, we decided to, in effect, reproduce or recreate in this treaty what was already in the Berne Convention. Human beings, being what they are, always think they can improve on something, fine-tune it or tweak it just a little bit to make it better. And there was a desire by many initially just to basically put the Berne right of reproduction verbatim into this treaty. Once you start changing anything, however, people get into disputes about the changes, so we ran into some difficulties. So, in the end, it was decided that the best thing to do was to say that the right of reproduction -- which we've known and recognized for a long time, as provided under Article 9 of the Berne Convention -- is already there.

But the "meat" of what's new about these treaties -- and has been new about them from the beginning -- remains. We already have in the Berne Convention a right of communication to the public, but that is the traditional right of public broadcasting, and only covers situations in which you are sending something out to many, many people at one time. Originally that was the right of putting on a play, and inviting the public to come and see it. The notion of the right of communication to the public is that there will be many people receiving the copyrighted work at exactly the same time. Right now I'm communicating to you in public. On the other hand, when you are in a networked environment, when you're delivering a copy of a computer program, or a copy of a newspaper story to an individual person who has perhaps requested it digitally, with a few keystrokes on a computer keyboard, and expects to receive that work instantaneously at any given point in time, say 3 o'clock in the morning, just for them, that is not a communication to the public. That's a private communication in a sense, and there is no right that clearly covered that under the Berne Convention.

With these treaties we now have a right of distribution of a product, which you will not find in the Berne Convention. We also now have a right of making available to the public, which you will not find in the Berne Convention. These rights are designed to deal with this digital environment -- to make it clear that if you take a digital work and send it through a computer network to somebody, anybody, you are making it available to the public.

Now we have covered those circumstances. We have a new right of distribution of copies. We have a new right of making available to the public. And we also have recognized that the right of communication to the public continues in the Berne context. So those are really the "meat" of the rights involved. There was a lot of excitement -- and anxiety -- created about the reproduction right language, and most of it was way overblown. We have always had a right of reproduction. We still do, and we will in the new digital environment. The only thing new is that we adopted some agreed statements at the diplomatic conference in which we provided permanent, explanatory language -- to the public and to national legislators who will have to implement these treaties -- as to what the treaties mean, and why we decided not to reinvent the right of reproduction in this treaty, why we decided simply to incorporate it by reference to the Berne Convention. What we ended up with, I think, was an explanatory statement that makes what we did very clear, and ultimately, was satisfactory to most people.

The United States had very clear interests at stake in the determination of this issue and, as a result, we felt it important to pursue a satisfactory conclusion, so we were a very active participant in this treaty together with many of our trading partners, such as the European Union, but also many other countries in the world which have a stake in the protection of intellectual property. Such countries as India, with one of the world's largest film industries and one of the strongest computer software industries in the emerging world, was an active participant in the Diplomatic Conference. And you can be sure that India had an opportunity to have input and influence the language of the treaty. You could say that about many other countries, like South Africa and Japan, and even countries that do not have large copyright-based industries had significant input into the treaties because they saw that strong copyright protection was in their national economic interests. While George Bernard Shaw was convinced that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man," I believe we made significant progress in Geneva precisely because many countries acted reasonably, knowing that these treaties were important, not only to them, but to many other countries who are only beginning to perceive the impact the digital age will have on their economies...

We are only now beginning to see the Internet and international electronic commerce develop. But there is a huge potential for growth and I would say the principal reason these new technologies have not been used thus far is precisely because of inadequate intellectual property protection globally. That's not merely speculative. You can look at digital audiotape technology, or digital video-disc technology -- two new technologies in which producers of the intellectual content had literally withheld their product from these technological marketplaces until they received the assurance both from the manufacturers of the technologies themselves and then, in concert with those manufacturers, the common commitment to go to national governments and receive intellectual property protection before they would release their product. In fact, we now have products appearing in digital audiotape for the first time, precisely because there have been such agreements. We now see the same thing is true in the digital video-disc environment. Those are -- even though very new technologies -- they are technologies where there is an embedding of intellectual property in a physical product.

Keep in mind, in the old technologies, even with something as old and new as a compact disc, you still can rely on national law to protect you, because you cannot send a compact disc past a customs agent, across a border, very easily unless you've made some kind of arrangements so that you can operate within a national market in which you feel you have obtained sufficient intellectual property protection. But in this new networked environment that's not the case; you have to have global protection, otherwise you will not be in the position to adequately protect your products.

What we are witnessing is the end of the birthing phase of the Internet, in that intellectual property protection is the fundamental requirement for providing incentives for producers and distributors of IP products to make their products and services available for purchase in a digital environment. We also have to recognize -- and this is a very important point when you talk about certain kinds of works being put out on the Internet right now -- that one of the most significant misunderstandings of intellectual property law, and the work that we are about, is that somehow we are requiring people to exercise their property rights. There is nothing that says you can't give away anything you would like to, for free. In the information world, that is done more than we may at first appreciate. Right now, people are stumbling over one another in order to give away information for free on the Internet. They want to get their name out there, they like reading their message on cyberspace, they want a million people to hear from them, they're trying to advertise themselves, they're experimenting.

Let me give you three examples, circumstances, which illustrate how this treaty, once implemented in the United States, will affect users of the Internet. To use The New York Times, or any other newspaper, as an example, the decision to post its publication on the Internet in the first place is a right that belongs to the Times. No one else but the new York Times has the right to do that. Right now you can get the Times pretty much free on the Internet, but I suspect that in another few years you won't be able to, because if that becomes the primary mechanism of distribution, that would not be economically viable. But you're seeing an experimentation process right now of copyright owners, particularly publishers, using these technologies. But the fundamental right to disseminate that work -- to make it available to the public, which is in that new treaty -- belongs to the Times.

Another example is that of taking the information on the Internet provided by the Times and selling it as a business. Here, too, the legal situation is very clear. That is, nobody but The New York Times has the right to go out and commercially distribute that product. That's what copyright is all about, at least in the United States.

The final example is when I receive a copy of The New York Times, or an article, on my computer, and decide to copy it to a floppy disc or perhaps to download it to my computer and e-mail it to a friend or relative. that is a more difficult problem. At the present time, and even under these new treaties, that circumstance will be dealt with somewhat differently from one country to another. In the United States, we have the Doctrine of Fair Use, which means that in certain cases when one makes a copy of a copyrighted work -- whether it's a photocopy, or a videotape of a television program, or a digital copy from a computer transmission of the type in this case -- in certain circumstances where you have not fundamentally violated the principal economic rights of the copyright owner or harmed them in any significant way, that copying of the work can be considered a "fair use" and can be done without permission or any compensation to the copyright owner.

Other countries have taken different approaches. They've said yes, we need to permit that kind of activity, partly because it's just ridiculous to try to stomp it out everywhere, but on the other hand we understand there is a right that the intellectual property owner has so we will recognize that that is private copying and will grant a right of private copying -- but then we will attach a royalty or a levy to the equipment that is used to make the copy. To the photocopying machine, in the case of a photocopy. To the blank tape or video-cassette recorder, if it's a video work. Or perhaps to the computer program or the computer tape if it is a computer work. Then those levies go into a large collection, and a collecting society in most cases will distribute them to rights holders on the basis of a claim that "my work is of such popularity." It's an inexact system, but it's been used for composers and lyricists in the music field going back for over a hundred years. So there will be different treatments.

For example, in some of the Scandinavian delegations at the Conference there was a great desire to make it clear that if libraries make one or more copies for use of their patrons, that's not going to be considered a regular reproduction and these exclusive rights are not going to apply. They were unsuccessful in having the treaty embody that principle and in having the agreed statement embody that principle. But, on an individual national basis, some countries have indicated that it is the way they, at least within their borders, will interpret the treaty. This international process, and international rulemaking, being such as it is -- it's a very imperfect process -- we will still have some disparity.

Of course, the intellectual property right is not the only property right at issue here. In almost every country in the world, a wristwatch is a piece of property, and if someone steals it from you it's a crime. But we would not take a $10,000 watch finely crafted in Geneva and simply leave it sitting in the powder room of this building for an hour and expect it to be there when we got back. You have to provide some physical security for certain kinds of encryption technologies. There will be a wide variety of products -- I don't expect newspapers will be encrypted very much, but, on the other hand, I expect that cinematographic products, sound recordings and valuable computer programs will not be distributed in anything other than an encrypted form. Only when you have made arrangements for payment will you receive the code enabling you to decrypt. We obviously don't want people selling a product in shops of Tijuana, or on the sidestreets of Hong Kong, for a few pesos or a few Hong Kong dollars, that would serve, in effect, as an electronic pass-key to anybody's attempt to lock-up or encrypt their product. That is one of the essential features of these treaties. All countries will be required to provide this protection and that is the one thing that the United States may have to amend its law to accommodate.

Of course, the question remains to what extent piracy can be prevented under these new treaties. The recent problems faced by the music group U-2 having some of their songs loaded onto the Internet without their consent, or cartoonist Gary Larson objecting to his "Far Side" cartoons being distributed without his permission are only well-known examples of what has occurred constantly on the Internet. So how do you prevent such piracy? Well, we've been trying for at least 10,000 years of recorded history to prevent theft of anything, and we aren't successful yet. As was observed by Mr. Badger in The Wind in the Willows, "the world is round, time is circular, and human nature is constant." All we can do is establish the fundamental norms, attempt to create systems of enforcement, and then try to keep theft under control. That is what we did in Geneva.

Let me turn to the issue of the ratification of these treaties by Congress, an important next step in the process. In many countries the procedure is such that the governments agree to adhere to this treaty, and the treaty will go into effect automatically, it will be self-executing, and their national legislatures or parliaments will not have to do anything. That is not the case in the United States. Our Constitution requires us, even though we signed the treaty and initialed our intent to adhere to it, to have a two-step process before we formally adhere to it. Because all treaties involve the sovereignty of our country, they must first be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, then, in the case of treaties which require modifications of our national law, both houses of Congress must enact, and the President sign, implementing legislation before they can become fully effective.

We are presently researching and examining existing U.S. statutory and common law to determine if implementing legislation is needed for our ratification of the treaties and, if so, the extent and scope of such legislation. We are committed to working closely with other agencies in the government to presenting these treaties for ratification by the Senate.

As for other issues which have been heatedly discussed and will undoubtedly continue to be part of the national debate on these treaties, we expect certain parties to urge Congress to take up the issue of online servicer provider (OSP) liability during this session. The administration has not recommended any legislation to change the standard of OSP liability, but nothing which transpired in Geneva prevents Congress from having wide latitude on this issue. As for the issue of "fair use," the administration recognizes that the doctrine of fair use is a crucial part of our copyright law. This is evidenced by the administration's expansive discussion of the fair use doctrine in the White Paper, in which it is concluded that no changes in section 107 were necessary because the fair use doctrine will continue to work well in a digital environment. It is further evidenced by Article 10 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, Article 16 of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and the interpretive statements accompanying these treaties, which make clear that members of these treaties are permitted to carry forward and appropriately extend into the digital environment limitations and exceptions in their national laws which have been considered acceptable under the Berne Convention, as well as allowing members to devise new limitations and exceptions that are appropriate in the digital network environment.

As many of you already know, the Diplomatic Conference did not take up the draft treaty on Intellectual Property Rights in Databases, which would have granted protection to certain databases not protected by copyright law, nor was it possible to achieve agreement on standards for the protection of the rights of audiovisual performers despite U.S.-led efforts to achieve a compromise solution. Instead, WIPO will take steps to further study the issues presented by sui generis database protection, and the rights of audiovisual performers in the fixations of their performances. This further study is critical since the need for the protection of data has increasingly become apparent in the digital world.

The European Union has already recognized the problem and has promulgated a new directive, which will become law in 1998 in every one of the 15 member states of the European Union, to provide a sui generis -- not a copyright, but some new kind of protection -- for substantial investments in databases, and it will protect those databases from substantial, unauthorized expropriation.

At the suggestion of the European Union initially, the United States and some other countries felt that we might be able to internationalize the concepts of the European directive during the diplomatic conference process in Geneva. But the database protection treaty proposal is a recent subject, and it became apparent that we did not have the time nor the broad based familiarity and knowledge about the issue in countries outside the European Union -- and I must say even by many people in the United States -- to conclude such a treaty at this time. So further study and discussion is necessary.

We plan to hold a series of intergovernmental meetings and public hearings in 1997 to obtain the full spectrum of public comments on sui generis database protection. Then, based on the input received, we will make a recommendation to the administration on how to proceed.

As for the issue of performers' rights in audiovisual works, that was probably one of the most significant issues to be considered during the conference. It probably didn't get as much publicity as some of the other issues, but it was a very significant issue. As I mentioned before, the sound-recording industry was the only industry at the time of the conference that did not enjoy some kind of universally recognized right of communication to the public, which would cover transmissions and public performances and so forth, and that you could interpret in national laws to cover them. So this was a very urgent matter. I will just say flatly that some of our European colleagues have long disapproved of the United States' system for protecting video performers. And I think they have disapproved of the success of that system. Indeed, one of the principal trade tensions across the Atlantic -- particularly one of the principal trade tensions with France -- is in the audiovisual industry. I think there was a desire on the part of some countries at the conference that if sound-recordings were going to receive protection, then they would also attempt to force the United States to make significant modifications in our audiovisual industry. Modifications that might make it more difficult to continue our competitive advantage. At the instigation of the European Union, it was proposed that the treaty be modified -- not just to deal with sound recordings but to also cover actors in all audiovisual works. The United States has a very successful system in that regard, which we did not want to change, and I think the expectation was that we would not be in a position where we wanted to change it if we wanted to solve the sound- recording problem. I think what was not expected on that side of the Atlantic was that the United States would make a good-faith effort to accommodate our European friends. And we did. We put on the table a provision which would have, for the first time ever, provided in the United States law a specific, automatic, statutory, inalienable right to compensation for foreign performers, from whatever country, regardless of whether or not they were members of guilds in the United Sates, or under contract with a United States company. Furthermore, we were prepared to do something else that I think surprised some of our European colleagues -- we were willing to recognize certain moral rights by statutory law in those video performances.

Once we did that, I think there was considerably less interest in harmonization in Europe and, at the request of the European Union, the audiovisual portion of the treaty was dropped. I think that was unfortunate, because there is a need to harmonize the treatment of audiovisual performers. I must say I am very disappointed that at least some governments -- and this is not true, by any means, of most countries in the world -- but at least some governments which wish to be able to preserve idiosyncratic systems for the treatment of their audiovisual industry so that they can retain protected markets and use intellectual property law as a trade barrier to both exclude foreign products and also develop idiosyncratic royalty and rights systems, which collect from members of the consuming public royalties such as video-levying royalties on foreign performances, and then use those collections to subsidize domestic industry. Unfortunately there was not a desire to harmonize in that area, and we had to abandon that part of the treaty. That was not something the United States would have wished, but we continue to be ready to discuss this matter.

In conclusion, there are essentially three next steps. The first two, adopting the two treaties we just signed, and passage of the Working Group's recommendations, are legislative steps that will result in the protection of intellectual property on the global and national information infrastructures, respectively. I hope that Congress will take these steps as rapidly as possible.

The other step, creating a framework for Global Electronic Commerce, is the project currently being considered by this administration. The first two steps signify the end of the birthing phase of the Internet. To stretch our analogy further, we are now ready to move to the child rearing stage of development. And, in fact, that process has already begun. For the past nine months, this administration has been working on the development of a strategy to facilitate the accelerated growth of the Internet. Currently, that plan is in draft format available for comment on the Information Infrastructure Task Force's home page (www.iitf.nist.gov). It covers everything from customs and electronic payment systems to privacy and security to technical standards and the creation of a Uniform Commercial Code for electronic commerce on the Net. Global Electronic Commerce is a critical aspect of this administration's trade and technology agenda and, rightly so, as global trade in services, including software, entertainment, and information products and professional services have continued to grow to over $40 billion of all U.S. exports, second only to military weapons and armaments. If that's the case so far with the Internet taking baby steps, I can't want to see it as it approaches adulthood!

I look forward to working with my colleagues throughout the administration on the next phase and hope that all of you with interest in these issues will look at the draft framework and provide comments to our administration.

As Alfred North Whitehead once observed, the art of progress in a democracy is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. The digital age challenge of us all -- even lawyers -- to be artists of change while preserving the essential order of legal protection for intellectual property.

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