0.1 The international framework  (Page 6/12)

Among other issues, ACTA will contain provisions to address "Internet distribution and information technology," such as authorizing officials to search for illegally downloaded music on personal devices at airports, or forcing Internet Service Providers to provide information about possible copyright infringers without a warrant.

Regional agreements

The multilateral agreements we have just described contain the primary provisions that limit the freedom of each country in shaping its own copyright laws. But some countries also belong to regional organizations that have the power to influence the copyright laws of their members.

The most important such regional organization is the  European Union , commonly known as the  EU . (A map showing the current membership of the EU, as well as the candidates for admission to the EU, is available  here .) Beginning in 1991, the EU has adopted several directives relating to copyright law. (A directive obliges the member countries to bring their laws into conformity with its requirements by a particular date, but leaves to each country's discretion some flexibility in achieving that goal.) For example, the Software Directive required member countries to grant copyright protection to the authors of software programs, regardless of how creative those programs are. The  Rental Rights Directive  required member countries to recognize "a right to authorize or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of copyright works...." (The background of this innovation and its significance for librarians will be discussed in  Module 4 ). The  Copyright Duration Directive  required member countries to extend copyright protection to the life of the author plus 70 years (20 years more than the term required by the Berne Convention). The controversial  Information Society Directive (also sometimes known as the Copyright Directive) was adopted in 2001 to implement the WCT, discussed above. (The main provisions of the Information Society Directive will be discussed in subsequent modules.) And the  Resale Rights Directive  obliges member countries to grant the creators of original works of art a right to remuneration when those works are resold.

Equally important for many African countries is the revised  Bangui Agreement  (executed in 1999; effective in 2002), which governs the member countries of the  African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI)  ( Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central Africa, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Chad, and Togo ). Articles 8 and 10 of Annex VII of the Agreement set forth an especially generous list of moral rights (reflecting its origins in French copyright law), while Article 9 sets forth a similarly generous list of economic rights, including the rental right. Articles 11 through 21 then carve out of those rights a long list of exceptions and limitations (to which we will return in Modules  4  and  5 ).

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) , which was entered into by  Canada, the United States, and Mexico  in 1994, limits the discretion of those three countries in defining their intellectual-property laws. However, with respect to copyright laws in particular, NAFTA closely parallels the TRIPS Agreement, discussed above, and thus has relatively little independent significance.