世界知识产权组织版权条约

背景

各缔约国出于以尽可能有效和一致的方式发展和维护作者对其文学和艺术作品之权利的愿望；承认有必要采用新规则并解释现有规则以提供解约由新形势所提出的问题的适当办法；强调版权保护作为文学和艺术创作促进因素的重要意义，制定本条约。

内容

条约提及了受版权保护的两个客体：计算机程序和数据库，规定计算机程序适用于伯尔尼公约第二条意义下的文学作品保护；规定数据库本身收到保护，但保护不延及数据资料本身。条约还对发行权、出租权、向公众传播的权利作了规定。条约还设立了缔约方大会和国际局。

The World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (WIPO Copyright Treaty or WCT) is an international treaty on copyright law adopted by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1996. It provides additional protections for copyright to respond to advances in information technology since the formation of previous copyright treaties before it. As of August 2026, the treaty has 119 contracting parties. The WCT and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, are together termed WIPO Internet Treaties.

History

During the earlier stages of negotiations, the WCT was seen as a protocol to the Berne Convention, constituting an update of that agreement since the 1971 Stockholm Conference. However, as any amendment to the Berne Convention required unanimous consent of all parties, the WCT was conceptualized as an additional treaty which supplemented the Berne Convention. The collapse of negotiations around the extension of the Berne Convention during the 1980s saw the shifting of the forum to the GATT, resulting in the TRIPS Agreement. Thus, the nature of any copyright treaty by the World Intellectual Property Organization became considerably narrower, being limited to addressing the challenges posed by digital technologies.

Development of the treaty

Beginning in 1989, the Contracting Parties to the Berne Convention, working through WIPO, agreed to establish a committee of experts to update the Convention for the digital age. In 1992, it was decided to divide the committee into two, following disagreements over the inclusion of sound recordings, since the United States sought to have them included in the new protocol, while the European Union and other countries argued that phonograms did not fall within the scope of their national copyright laws or the Berne Convention, since they were protected under the system of neighbouring rights and were covered by the 1961 Rome Convention. As consequence, the first committee focused on developing a "protocol" to the Berne Convention that would extend copyright protection to computer programs and databases, while the second was tasked with developing a new treaty on the rights of performers and producers of phonograms. The work of this second committee would eventually lead, years later, to the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.

Both committees met several times, separately as well as jointly.……

Protection granted by the Treaty

The WCT emphasizes the incentive nature of copyright protection, claiming its importance to creative endeavours. It ensures that computer programs are protected as literary works (Article 4), and that the arrangement and selection of material in databases is protected (Article 5). It provides authors of works with control over their rental and distribution in Articles 6 to 8, which they may not have under the Berne Convention alone. It also prohibits circumvention of technological measures for the protection of works (Article 11) and unauthorized modification of rights management information contained in works (Article 12).

The treaty has been criticised for being too broad (for example in its prohibition of circumvention of technical protection measures, even where such circumvention is used in the pursuit of legal and fair use rights) and for applying a "one size fits all" standard to all signatory countries, despite their widely differing stages of economic development and knowledge industry.

Implementation

The WIPO Copyright Treaty is implemented in United States law by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By Decision 2000/278/EC of 16 March 2000, the Council of the European Union approved the treaty on behalf of the European Community. European Union Directives which largely cover the subject matter of the treaty are: Directive 91/250/EC, creating copyright protection for software; Directive 96/9/EC on copyright protection for databases; and Directive 2001/29/EC, prohibiting devices for circumventing "technical protection measures", such as digital rights management (also known as DRM).