[A2k] Follow the Media: WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Dead …For Now

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

<SNIP>

“Several country delegations began to ask deeper questions about the
rationale for the treaty, and examined ways to limiting the scope and
nature of the treaty,” said James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology
International, reviewing Friday’s wimpy finale.  “In the end, the
broadcasters demanded too much, and made too few concessions, for the
treaty to move forward. Delegates at WIPO were no longer willing to
ignore issues of access to knowledge,
or the control of anticompetitive practices.”

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http://followthemedia.com/mediarules/wipo23062007.htm

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WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Dead…For Now

Michael Hedges - June 25, 2007
Major treaties, internationally binding, are consecrated every so
often, typically years in the making. In this digital age, that’s a
problem. WIPO’s Broadcasting Treaty might be dead, for now, but it
remains a problem looking for a place to happen.


Sometime Friday (June 22) WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and
Related Rights (SCCR) gave up, unofficially, after nearly ten years of
negotiating. A week of mostly closed-door negotiations failed to
achieve agreement on a treaty draft that would have been sent to the
Diplomatic Conference scheduled for November. The end result might have
been a treaty among the 184 WIPO signatory Member States establishing a
new range of intellectual property rights, the essential provision
being a 50 year right conferred on broadcasters for anything they
transmit, content ownership rights being a separate issue.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was established in
1967 to “promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the
world.” WIPO became a United Nations specialized agency in 1974,
located in Geneva, Switzerland. It primarily functions as administrator
of existing treaties, and taking fees (€300 million in 2006) for the
effort.

One of those treaties is the mainstay of all international broadcast
rights law, the 1961 Rome Convention. Like all treaties, regulations
and media-related law written in the last century, it’s hopelessly out
of date.

WIPO took up broadcasters rights at the behest of big broadcasters
looking for a much stronger anti-piracy treaty. The general intent was
to clamp down – or clamp fees – on re-transmission. Killing the fair
use principle, Creative Commons and public domain would be a residual
benefit to broadcasters. Both re-transmission and fair use became
subject of the north-south dilemma dividing ever more developed and
developing nations.

European delegates, led by the broadcasting lobby, argued for a new
right given to broadcasters over anything transmitted regardless of
content ownership. Consumer groups and big telecoms insisted on
limiting the treaty to a broadcasters signal rather than the content.

Last weeks’ SCCR negotiations were more or less doomed from the
beginning. The draft in discussion was passed last September under
“highly unusual” circumstances, according to a WIPO delegate preferring
not to be identified. He added, “Intel and Microsoft lobbyists are all
over the building.”

“It would be better to abandon the process and admit that ten years’
work at WIPO had been wasted,” said Association of Commercial
Television of Europe (ACTE) general director Ross Biggam, quoted by the
Hollywood Reporter. “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,"

Those “free-riders” seem to be nasty (and un-billable) consumers
uploading and downloading podcasts and, likely, video clips to YouTube.

“Several country delegations began to ask deeper questions about the
rationale for the treaty, and examined ways to limiting the scope and
nature of the treaty,” said James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology
International, reviewing Friday’s wimpy finale.  “In the end, the
broadcasters demanded too much, and made too few concessions, for the
treaty to move forward. Delegates at WIPO were no longer willing to
ignore issues of access to knowledge, or the control of anticompetitive
practices.”

The tech sector, aided by civil society groups, won this round on the
argument that the internet’s power trumps all. For the foreseeable
future – whatever that’s worth – broadcasters will not have the backing
of international treaty to stop a person from uploading a video clip
gleaned from a broadcasters transmission and uploading it to YouTube or
re-transmitting a broadcast signal within a home network. Perhaps
broadcasting industry could take a reality check from the music
industry’s attempts at controlling new media technologies.

The biggest loser in this episode is WIPO. Failure to bring the
Broadcasting Treaty to a Diplomatic Conference reflects badly on SCCR
members and very badly on WIPO General Secretary Kamil Idris. Several
developed nations, the United States included, find their constituents
better served within the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty. Traditional media will
continue to chase “free-riders” but international treaties have broad
stakeholders evermore diligent in defending common sense content and
distribution rights.

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@keionline.org