[A2k] H/wood Reporter: Xcasters Treaty Has Few Friends

[Seth Johnson]

> http://hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/international/news/e3ib6d2c95cdf6b2ef335f084a98fbd72f8?imw=Y


WIPO broadcast treaty has few friends


By Leo Cendrowicz

June 19, 2007


BRUSSELS -- A planned broadcaster protection treaty under negotiation
this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva is
being slammed from all sides by broadcasters, IT giants and consumer
groups.

Officials at WIPO, the United Nations agency devoted to copyright
issues, are attempting to update the 1961 Rome Convention on the
Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting
Organizations, which predates much of modern television technology.
The need to revise the treaty has been made more acute by a growing
signal-piracy problem in many parts of the world.

But commercial broadcasters have warned that the proposed treaty risks
being stripped of any worthwhile measures as officials tried to reach
a consensus among the negotiating governments.

"It fails to give broadcasters the rights we need to take action
against free-riders in the Internet environment and, outside the
European Union, it fails to give broadcasters the right to authorize
legitimate exploitation of our services online," said Ross Biggam,
general director of the Association of Commercial Television in
Europe.

If WIPO's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights can
produce a draft version of a broadcast treaty by Friday, the measure
will go to a full diplomatic convention in November. But Biggam said
that WIPO's members are compromising too much to reach a deal.

"This would deprive broadcasters of real rights and remedies, and that
is too high a price to pay. It would be better to abandon the process
and admit that 10 years' work at WIPO had been wasted," he said.

The draft text would give broadcasters exclusive rights over anything
they transmit -- equivalent to a new intellectual property right.
Designed to prevent the international pirating of TV signals, it has
attracted the ire of IT and Web firms who say that it extends WIPO
regulation to the Internet.

Key IT firms and consumer groups last month signed a statement
opposing the WIPO treaty, saying such rights over recording and
retransmission could substantially raise the costs of using
broadcasted material for personal or educational purposes, inhibit
creativity and restrict the entry of information into the public
domain. They also said it will create an entirely new set of liability
problems for companies that aggregate third-party content.

The group -- which included AT&T, Creative Commons, Google, Verizon,
Dell, the Consumer Electronics Assn. and the International Music
Managers Forum -- warned that such a "rights-based approach" went well
beyond what is needed to ban the theft of signals, which has cost
broadcasters advertising and sales revenues.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the 1961 Rome Convention, which granted
exclusive rights in signals to broadcasters. But Washington is still
working to limit the scope of the proposed treaty to the combating of
signal theft, instead of the more expansive rights that broadcasters
had originally been seeking.