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The only problem is that this convention was forged way back in 1971, before the internet was even a glimmer in the eye of academia.

When the only way to move music, the written word, or other forms of copyrighted material from one country to another was by way of physical transport -- and when such material would have to be manually distributed to recipients, the Berne Convention was quite workable.

Since the Net became ubiquitous however, the limited scope of this base-set of laws has become a real problem.

Take, for example, the fact that it doesn't actually prescribe a common timeframe for copyright protection - leaving this up to individual countries to prescribe.

In many countries, this term of protection is relatively short, meaning that some literary and musical works are now beginning to fall into the public domain.

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For example, copyright protection for the 1936 novel "Gone with the Wind" has now lapsed in a number of countries, including Australia.

This means that it now falls into the public domain, allowing anyone to copy and distribute it without the need for a license or the payment of royalties.

With this in mind, the nice guys operating the Australian arm of Project Gutenberg added it to their collection of freely downloadable works.

Unfortunately they struck a bit of a problem.

While the work was no longer protected by copyright in Australia, that was most certainly not the case in the USA where the term of protection was extended some years ago -- mainly in order to provide Disney with an ongoing monopoly over many of its characters, including Mickey Mouse.

So is it legal for a US-resident to download a copy of "Gone with the Wind" from a legally operating website in Australia?

Or what if an Australian emails a copy of that "public domain" novel to a friend in the USA? Did the Australian commit a crime by sending the file? Did the US citizen commit a crime by receiving what is (to them) a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright-holder? What if it was unsolicited?

It all sounds like a bit of a legal minefield to me.

This potentially explosive situation was resolved when the novel in question was pulled from the Australian site -- but what if they hadn't? And what happens when the same situation occurs with other more popular works that are about to fall out of copyright protection?

I suspect that, in the wake of the recently negotiated free trade agreement, the copyright laws will be revised to fall into line with the USA -- but there are many other countries which have an equally short term of protection, what's going to happen there?

Will the USA become a "copyright superpower" and simply demand that all other nations conform to its own idea of what's best or will this turn into a lawyer's heaven with lawsuits ricochetting around the world like bullets in Iraq?

Once again (and I must admit to getting a little tired of this), I call for all countries to get together and agree to set up a cyberspace jurisdiction where a consistent set of laws can be produced and enforced -- regardless of the geographical location of an offender.

Why can't politicians seem to understand that cyberspace is a real place that exists everywhere there's a Net connection?

I strongly believe that it's only by creating this separate jurisdiction that we'll have any real hope of controlling spam, protecting intellectual property adequately, and dealing with other concerns such as fraud, child pornography, etc.

I'd love to hear the excuses as to why they're not actively working on this.

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