[A2k] "by any means" -- WIPO poised to impose new fees on Internet transmissions of TV programs

[James Love]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/by-any-means-wipo-
po_b_53109.html
James Love
The Huffington Post
June 21, 2007

"by any means" -- WIPO poised to impose new fees on Internet
transmissions of TV programs

I'm in Geneva at a meeting of World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO), where negotiators have one final day to finish a
draft text for a new treaty on "broadcasting." The main demanders of
the treaty are the owners of television stations, such as the U.S.
based National Broadcasters Association (NBA) and the Association of
Commercial Television in Europe (ACT), and their counterparts in
Asia, Latin America and Africa. There is also a strong push for the
treaty by companies like Time Warner, News Corp, Disney, and Vivendi,
which aggregate programs into "channels." (See a partial list here).

The proposed treaty, which is opposed by a coalition of civil society
NGOs and library groups, seeks to impose broad new intellectual
property rights to companies that broadcast third party content over
wireless or cable television networks.

Last evening, the United States delegation told negotiators that the
new rights be must be extended to deferred broadcasts to the public,
"by any means." This wording is specifically intended to impose new
liabilities on the reuse of program on the Internet.

Big losers in this negotiation so far are the growing number of web
sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, etc, that feature access to
clips from television programs, including political content such as
presidential debates or news shows, that are recorded from television
(including cable or satellite) and shown, often as excerpts, on the
Internet.

The new intellectual property right is given to the companies that
broadcast the content, not the owners of the copyright in the
programs themselves. The broadcaster's new exclusive rights are
modeled after (but expanded from) the 1961 Rome Convention's
broadcaster's right - a treaty the United States never signed. The
owners of the TV or cable systems, or even the cable channels, like
HBO, FX, TBS, the Discovery Channel, or Spike TV, can assert the
right, and demand injunctions or fees when works are used on the
Internet, even when the copyright owner itself does not take any
action against the Internet use of the work, or the work is in the
public domain under copyright law.

The US delegation is taking positions that are contrary to U.S. law,
opposed by many leading U.S, technology firms, like Intel, Dell
Computers, A&T and Verizon, library and consumer rights groups (see
details here and here) but also the positions of Senators Leahy and
Specter, who have called on the U.S. negotiators to oppose the
treaty, if it provided intellectual property rights to the
broadcasters, for merely transmitting works.

Making matters worse, the U.S. government and the European Commission
are taking a hard line against various proposes to include
protections for measures that protect use for education, the need to
promote access to knowledge and information and national educational
and scientific objectives, or which give governments more flexibility
to "curb anti-competitive practices, and to promote the public
interest in sectors of vital importance to its socio-economic,
scientific and technological development." The US government is also
opposing language acknowledging the right of governments to protect
"cultural diversity."

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James Packard Love
Knowledge Ecology International
mailto:james.love@keionline.org
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / U.S. mobile+1.202.361.3040, Geneva mobile
+41.76.413.6584

"If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks." Bill Walton"