[Ecommerce] MIT Tech Review: Webcasting Gets a Reprieve

[Seth Johnson]

> http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16783


Webcasting Gets a Reprieve

International treaty provisions that would prevent the
retransmission of media over the Web have been dropped -- for
now.


By Wade Roush

Monday, May 08, 2006


If proposed rules preventing the digital retransmission of TV,
radio, or cable broadcasts are adopted as part of an
international treaty on broadcasting, it could have repercussions
throughout the nascent world of Web broadcasting. For instance,
it might become illegal for musicians to offer recordings of
their performances on their own websites, or for bloggers to post
video and audio files -- even if the content is in the public
domain.

But last week countries opposed to these provisions -- which
would have given broadcasters and cable TV companies broad new
rights to control information on the Internet -- managed to strip
them from the treaty, at least temporarily.

During a five-day meeting in Geneva of the U.N. World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on
Copyright and Related Rights, an unlikely coalition of delegates
from developing nations and technology organizations such as
Intel and the U.S. Telecom Association voiced strong objections
to treaty provisions covering webcasting and "simulcasting" over
broadcast or cable networks and computer networks. By the end of
the meeting, on May 5, the committee, which had intended to
finish a draft treaty that could be agreed upon by the WIPO
General Assembly in 2007, decided to send the assembly only the
less controversial sections of the treaty. Debate over the
Internet provisions was deferred until this fall.

"The good news is that webcasting is out of the treaty," says
Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, a civil liberties
organization based in San Francisco, which sent a representative
to the meeting. "But it's a little too soon to celebrate," he
adds, since one article still in the main draft of the treaty
gives broadcasters the exclusive right to authorize
retransmission of their broadcasts by any means, including over
computer networks.

Disparagement of the proposed webcasting rules has been rife
since a previous meeting of the WIPO committee last November,
when delegates from the United States proposed extending the
draft treaty's protections for traditional broadcasts to cover
material delivered over the Internet. According to Gross and
other observers, the "WIPO Treaty on the Protection of
Broadcasting Organizations," as the document is called, was
originally conceived to strengthen legal safeguards against
signal theft -- the interception and sharing of satellite, cable,
or over-the-air broadcasts.

But as work on the draft treaty progressed, proposed rules giving
the original broadcasters of a program the sole power to
authorize such rebroadcasts via traditional means grew to include
Internet transmission. "We saw the big broadcasters getting very
interested in this treaty and adding a whole new slew of rights,"
Gross says, as well as inserting new proposals via a sympathetic
U.S. delegation to the WIPO committee.

The proposed webcasting rules would give broadcasting
organizations a new kind of property right over audio and video
transmissions. Once a film, TV show, or song had been broadcast,
the draft proposals gave the broadcaster control over access to
that content for as long as 50 years.

In Geneva last week, representatives from Brazil, Iran, Thailand,
India, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Ghana,
as well as other nations, expressed anger about the provisions,
and questioned why the language from the November meeting
remained in the draft treat -- despite the objections of many
WIPO members.

"There cannot be any rights [in the treaty] overlaying the rights
of the content owners," stated one delegate from India, according
to a transcript of the meeting prepared by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF). "India opposes the inclusion of
webcasting in any fashion...the focus should be empowering
broadcast organizations to prevent piracy of signals."

Allied with the dissenting nations were several U.S. technology
organizations, including chipmaker Intel. Jeff Lawrence, director
of digital home and content policy at Intel, and Brad Biddle, a
senior attorney in Intel's Systems Technology Lab, released a
statement in advance of the meeting expressing the company's
opposition to the treaty. "Proponents have not demonstrated that
the benefits of creating new exclusive rights outweigh the
burdens that these new rights impose," they said.

The problem, from Intel's point of view, is that the proposed
webcasting restrictions could limit the ways consumers can
manipulate and experience digital media in their homes -- and
therefore depress the market for new entertainment-oriented
computing systems. "The treaty could give broadcasting
organizations the right to control uses of content within the
home -- uses that are legitimate and non-infringing under
copyright law," wrote Lawrence and Biddle. "For example, makers
of digital video recorders could be required to obtain licenses
and agree to limitations imposed by broadcasters in order to
enable 'time shifting' of broadcast content."

In the end, the U.N. committee members voted to remove the
webcasting language from the main treaty draft, and instead
placed it into a new proposal to be discussed at a separate
meeting.

The U.S. delegation was "not happy about the outcome," according
to Gwen Hinze, a staff attorney for the EFF who blogged about the
conference from Geneva. The delegation "said it was concerned
with the 'missed opportunity' to provide protection" for webcasts
by traditional broadcasters, he wrote. "[Now] we wait to see the
new draft proposal [due in August]."

The mission of the World Intellectual Property Organization, one
of 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations, is primarily to
harmonize copyright and patent laws around the world. It oversees
23 international treaties on intellectual property rights enacted
since 1883, and periodically drafts new treaties to keep up with
changing markets and communications technologies.

Its last major treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO
Performance and Phonograms Treaty, both adopted in 1996, forced
signatories to amend their own copyright laws to deal with the
rise of digital piracy, for example, by outlawing attempts to
foil digital encryption schemes and other anti-copying
technologies. In the United States, these treaties led directly
to the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998,
which has been criticized by freedom-of-information advocates for
stifling fair and legal uses of copyrighted content.

"WIPO is a tool by which old media industries try to suppress the
new developments that threaten their control," says Tim O'Reilly,
CEO of technology publisher O'Reilly Media, one of 20 technology
companies to endorse an EFF briefing paper opposing the
webcasting provisions last November. "While the Net is not
without its problems, it's still in the formative stages, and I'd
sure hate to see it put under all the same regimes as old media,"
says O'Reilly. "After all, the new activity on the net arose
specifically because of the opportunity to route around some of
those restrictions."