[Random-bits] WIPO Stumbles on broadcast treaty

[James Love]

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

January 18, 2007 The Huffington Post
James Love 	
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.

---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /  
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

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