COPYRIGHT LAWS TO ENTER DIGITAL AGE.

Byline: Peter H. Lewis The New York Times

Copyright laws are under technological siege. Intended to ensure a financial return to those who create everything from poetry to computer software, as well as reasonable public access to such material, the current laws may be unequal to the task.

Copies of the latest Madonna song, a computer spreadsheet or a telephone directory can all be duplicated and distributed on the Internet at the click of a computer mouse, often with little regard for the legal rights of the owners of their copyrights.

Now, for the first time in the age of the personal computer and the Internet, copyright experts from 160 countries are gathering in Switzerland today to begin to write new international treaties protecting intellectual property in the digital age.

One treaty proposal is directed at the protection of literary and artistic works, another at music recording or phonograms, and a third tries for the first time to establish copyright protections for databases.

Delegates to the World Intellectual Property Organization diplomatic conference in Geneva, which will conclude Dec. 20, hope to agree on one or more global pacts to update copyright laws for an era in which anything that can be copyrighted can be digitized, and anything that can be digitized can be distributed almost instantly around the world.

The United States expects to play an aggressive role in setting the digital agenda, though it is unclear whether it will carry the day. Its delegation, led by Bruce Lehman, the commissioner of patents and trademarks, will offer three proposals to protect literary and artistic works, music recordings and databases from unauthorized use.

The Clinton administration and the film and recording industries are strong supporters of these proposals, while an array of academic, scientific, consumer and technical organizations have come out in opposition.

Some of the problems involved are encapsulated in the furor created recently when the cartoonist Gary Larson sent on-line fans - in countries ranging from Australia to Switzerland - a general plea to stop duplicating his work.

``Please, please refrain from putting `The Far Side' out on the Internet,'' Larson wrote recently in an e-mail message to several fans who had collected, digitized and electronically published his works for all to enjoy.

``These cartoons are my children, of sorts, and like a parent, I'm concerned about where they go at night without telling me. . . . And seeing them at someone's Web site is like getting the call at 2 a.m. that goes, `Uh, Dad, you're not going to like this much, but guess where I am.' ''

While several operators honored Larson's wishes and removed his cartoons, the reaction of the Internet community was indicative of the ethos of those users accustomed to the free flow of information.

``All this copyright-infringement enforcing ticks me off,'' one unidentified computer user wrote on the same site as the Larson posting. ``What good is the Net for if we can't view a Far Side cartoon, or listen to a sound file from the Simpsons, or perhaps, dare I say it, look at a picture from a scanned magazine

''

Supporters of the U.S. proposals say such attitudes are one of the main reasons that changes in international copyright law are needed to halt the growing international trend to pirate billions of dollars' worth of intellectual property.

Without stronger protections, they argue, there will be no incentive to develop new material to sate the appetite of the emerging global-information infrastructure.

The cost of that piracy in lost sales is certain to grow in coming years as high-speed networks and new technologies become available to casual PC users, permitting even feature-length films, TV shows and CD-length musical recordings to be easily copied and distributed.

Critics say the administration's proposals would, if embraced by the global community, tip the delicate balance of copyright law away from information consumers, giving broad new rights to an entertainment industry that once tried to block the sale of videocassette recorders.

``If we don't preserve that balance, then only information proprietors will cross the bridge into the 21st century,'' said Adam Eisgrau, legislative counsel for the American Library Association, one of more than a dozen groups opposing the treaty proposals.

Eisgrau said the language of the administration's proposals seriously diminishes the idea of ``fair use,'' which allows limited copying of copyrighted material.

Worse, he said, it could stifle the growth of the Internet, encourage Internet providers to spy on customers for copyright violations, and restrict access to data ranging from government documents to baseball box scores.

The last international intellectual-property accords, established in 1971, contain no explicit protection for recorded music or computer software, Lehman said.

As recent trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the global General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade show, there is no requirement that U.S. negotiators have a consensus of public opinion.

But legislation based on many of the proposals advocated by Lehman failed to gain support in Congress earlier this year, and the plan covering copyrights for databases goes far beyond any existing copyright law now on the books.

In an article in a coming issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review on the database treaty proposal, Pamela Samuelson, a visiting professor of copyright law at the University of California at Berkeley, and J.H. Reichman of Vanderbilt University concluded that ``overwhelming lobbying pressures'' had devised ``one of the least balanced and most potentially anti-competitive intellectual property rights ever created.''

If adopted by the international group, the proposals would effectively be sent back to Congress for a ratification vote, a prospect that alarms many people who say there is a need for public debate, since the global group historically meets only once in a generation.

``We are concerned that they may limit public availability of information, contrary to the spirit of open access and contrary to the idea of the Internet as a source of global information,'' said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist who heads the public policy department of the Association of Computing Machinery.

At best, some critics argue, it is premature to sign long-term pacts governing an evolving communications medium. At worst, Samuelson said, ``It is a flagrant giveaway to the copyright industry.''

Criticisms about the potential curtailing of free-use provisions strongly rile Lehman, a former lobbyist for the copyright industry.

``That's absolute garbage,'' Lehman said before leaving for Geneva last week. ``We are protecting people against the theft of their intellectual property, not trying to stop fair use. If you're going to have people making large-scale investment in this new digital environment, they have to have some sense of security that they are going to be protected and make money on it.''

``Conversely, we don't want to have any impeding of the free flow of information,'' he added. ``Fair use will continue to exist in the digital environment. If anyone can demonstrate that we are going to do something in Geneva that will not serve those purposes, we will fix it.''