[A2k] James Love in Huffington Post: WIPO Stumbles on broadcast treaty

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/wipo-stumbles-on-
broadcas_b_38946.html

WIPO Stumbles on broadcast treaty

Geneva: The specialized UN Agency known as the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) is meeting this week to finalize an
eight-year negotiation on a new treaty for the protection of broadcast
organizations. The treaty comes at a time when our whole concept of
what constitutes a broadcast or a broadcaster is undergoing profound
changes.

Many now follow news events from youtube videos clips (including
apparently President Bush, who told 60 minutes he watched the cell
phone video of the Saddam hanging on the Internet). The proliferation
of low cost video cameras and editing software, higher bandwidth cable,
satellite and Internet connections, are creating a highly diverse and
dynamic environment for creating, distributing, redistributing and
remixing information. To this exciting world the UN's specialized
agency for intellectual property wants to impose a new legal regime.
The problem is, no one here has a clue what the legal regime should
look like.

One faction in the negotiations wants to revamp provisions in a 1962
treaty (one that the United States and 80 other countries never
signed), with new or expanded intellectual property rights for anyone
who "broadcasts" third party content. Relying upon the current 108 page
draft of the treaty, they propose that anyone who qualifies as a
"broadcaster" or "cablecaster" would get a set of exclusive rights to
prevent others from re-publishing or using the information, including
on the Internet, without permission from the broadcaster or
cablecaster. This right would be in addition to the rights and
permissions (if any) associated with the copyright in the work, and
would apply even to works that are in the public domain, or where the
copyright owner was willing to freely distribute the work. It would
create an entirely new set of liability problems for companies that
aggregate third party content, a fact that lawyers for Yahoo and News
Corp (treaty supporters) have apparently not explained to their CEOs.

One of the big beneficiaries of this new treaty would be the giant
companies that own the major cable channels, like TBS, FX, Bravo, TCM,
Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc. If the treaty is extended to the
Internet, as some have proposed, it would extend this "distributor"
right to every web page that "scheduled" access to video clips of any
kinds. Attending this meeting are lobbyists for cable channel owners
like Viacom, Time-Warner and News Corp, as well as many technology
companies and non-profit groups like CPTech, EFF, or the Third World
Network (TWN).

Opposing this scenario are a growing group of countries that want the
treaty to take a much narrower approach, only prohibiting the "theft"
of programing signals, but not extending an intellectual property right
in other people's copyrighted works. The problem is, no one can explain
why such protection is needed, since it is already illegal to steal
cable or satellite service under many existing laws, including existing
copyright laws.

Wednesday was supposed to be the day when the WIPO negotiators would
adopt a new, narrower, approach for the treaty. However, none of the
countries in the negotiation could explain how a narrower treaty might
work, or why it is really needed, and the Finish Chair of the
negotiating committee proposed new language that was seemed to worse
than the 108 page draft.

Today we might hear from NGOs, like mine.

The negotiations are taking place in the WIPO Standing Committee on
Copyright and Related Rights, known here as the SCCR. If WIPO can find
an exit strategy from this marathon negotiation, it will have to do
something else. Chile has asked the SCCR to consider a treaty that
provides for minimum safeguards (limitations and exceptions to rights)
for uses of copyrighted works, particularly for libraries, schools and
the handicapped, and 16 countries have called for a broader treaty on
access to knowledge -- quite different directions than the current
treaty proposal.

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
CPTech
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@cptech.org