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The Directors Guild decision to take its case to Geneva represents the second major recent effort by the creative community to bring attention to artists' rights. In a separate move, directors Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson in May started raising $100,000 in contributions for Representative Robert Mrazek, D-N.Y., a champion of artists' rights.

Among the contributors to Spielberg and Levinson's pitch for Mrazek were such major talents as Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Francis Coppola, Tom Cruise, David Geffen, Dustin Hoffman, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Don Simpson and Bob Zemeckis.

Proponents of artists' rights in Hollywood are making their case abroad this week, in scenic Geneva, Switzerland, where an international copyright conference convened Monday. The debate positions some of film's biggest creative names against many of the nation's biggest media and entertainment corporations.

Representatives of the Directors Guild of America delivered a statement Monday that argues for ""the right to object" to any defacement of their work - a right they contend that U.S. law does not protect. The directors, as well as other artists, feel they lack the means to challenge colorization and other new technologies that alter the movies they created.

But the U.S. government took the position in Geneva that the country already is in compliance with the Berne Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which governs artists' rights.

The Directors Guild decision to take its case to Geneva represents the second major recent effort by the creative community to bring attention to artists' rights. In a separate move, directors Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson in May started raising $100,000 in contributions for Representative Robert Mrazek, D-N.Y., a champion of artists' rights.

The efforts by the directors and the political fund-raising also upset the conventional wisdom that only the producers and monied executives have political clout. Further, these efforts are reviving the old confrontation between art and commerce. In this case, who controls finished motion pictures - the artists who create them, or those who pay for their production?

Among the contributors to Spielberg and Levinson's pitch for Mrazek were such major talents as Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Francis Coppola, Tom Cruise, David Geffen, Dustin Hoffman, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Don Simpson and Bob Zemeckis.

On the other side is a Washington, D.C.-based lobby known as the Committee for America's Copyright Community, formed in early 1989. According to Michael R. Klipper, counsel for the committee, its members include such industry groups as the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Association of American Publishers, as well as such corporations as Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting.