[LINK] Understanding the WIPO Broadcast Treaty
Kim Holburn
kim at holburn.net
Wed Nov 1 11:56:37 AEDT 2006
Understanding the WIPO Broadcast Treaty
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/wipo.ars
Some selected text:
> Your rights are in danger.
>
> That's the message that activist groups have been spreading as the
> World Intellectual Property Organization moves tortoise-like
> towards the completion of a new broadcasting treaty that could
> curtail the ways that consumers use media and could create a broad
> new intellectual property right over electromagnetic transmissions
> that could last for 50 years.
> The new broadcast treaty has also had a long, strange trip from
> conception to object of international controversy. Like most long,
> strange trips, this one began in the 60s, when the Rome Convention
> was signed (actually the International Convention for the
> Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting
> Organizations, which was signed in Rome in 1961).
>
> The Rome Convention gave European broadcasters the right to control
> rebroadcasts, "fixations" (recordings), and public performance of
> their transmissions for 20 years after the broadcast was first made
> (the US never signed). The treaty included several safeguards,
> though: people could use transmissions in news broadcasts without
> asking permission and they could them in education and for
> scientific research. Apart from these provisions, those who wanted
> to make use of broadcast material had to seek the permission of the
> broadcaster—and all of this was in addition to needing the
> permission of the copyright holder, who is very often a different
> party.
> We do know a few things. "Broadcasting" means "transmissions by
> wireless means, by radio waves propagating freely in space." Clear
> enough, right? Except it's not. Some delegations to WIPO have
> pushed for a broader definition that includes wireline
> transmissions. Others argue that the treaty should use both the
> terms "cablecasting" and "broadcasting" separately. Though the end
> result is the same, this is the sort of thing that gets argued
> about when you put people from across the globe into a room and try
> to hammer out a treaty.
> The EFF worries that the proposed treaty would allow broadcasters
> to lock up public domain material simply by showing it, after which
> potential consumers of that video would need the network's
> permission to use it. This isn't actually true; the only thing
> prohibited would be using your recording of that network broadcast
> as the source for the public domain material. Under any of the
> scenarios considered in the treaty, users could still go directly
> to the source, obtain the material, and use it freely. The only
> right broadcasters get would be over their own particular
> transmission; they have no control over the source material.
>
> That said, granting additional broadcast rights could create some
> legitimate problems. The CDT points out that this situation could
> create ambiguity; what if you aren't sure whether the source is a
> broadcast or not? Consider a Creative Commons-licensed clip found
> on the Internet that a documentary filmmaker wants to use. "Under
> the proposed treaty," says the CDT, "the person might well worry
> that the content may have been recorded from a broadcast or
> cablecast. For fear of violating potential broadcast or cablecast
> rights, the person might refrain from redistribution—even though
> the content may not have come from a recorded broadcast at all."
> Dr. Boyle also argues that the draft treaty could well be
> unconstitutional in the US, because intellectual property rights
> are restricted to creative work. "They [the treaty drafts] create
> new copyright-like rights over unoriginal material, indeed material
> that is frequently copyrighted by someone else," he writes in the
> Financial Times. "That violates a core requirement of the copyright
> clause of the constitution."
>
> Not surprisingly, the NAB disagrees. Jane Mago tells Ars that
> broadcasting does involve creative work and effort. The very act of
> building a broadcast infrastructure and keeping it running is, in
> some sense, creative, and she notes that broadcasters do in fact
> create the signal. Any rights granted by the treaty would be over
> this signal, not over the material contained in it, so she believes
> that Boyle's criticism is unfounded.
> Those who oppose the treaty are sympathetic to this problem; they
> simply don't feel that creating a new IP right is the best way to
> handle it. Much better, in their view, to simply outline the sort
> of behavior that should be illegal and require signatories to
> criminalize it.
>
> James Love, who directs the Consumer Project on Technology, tells
> Ars Technica that a rights-based approach is funadmentally wrong-
> headed because broadcasters are getting these additional rights at
> no additional risk. Broadcasters are "doing what they would do
> anyway," he says, but he, like most others, would support a signal
> theft approach.
--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +61 2 61258620 M: +61 417820641 F: +61 2 6230 6121
mailto:kim at holburn.net aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request
Cacert Root Cert: http://www.cacert.org/cacert.crt
Aust. Spam Act: To stop receiving mail from me: reply and let me know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD] http://www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/
datefmt.htm
Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
-- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961
More information about the Link
mailing list