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World Copyright Treaty Coming soon
ebresie writes: "According to an article in Info World,
the World Intellectual Property Organization indicates that the WIPO Copyright Treaty is scheduled to go into effect in March of 2002. The treaty "is designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media." It also makes reference of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty which "specifically protects the digital-media rights of producers and performers of sound recordings"." This is not a "new" treaty; rather it's the old one, which says much the same thing as the DMCA and was used to justify the passage of the DMCA. Now the same provisions will be in effect across many countries.
Could the GPL be extended to, say, artistic works? That way an artist could simply copyright(copyleft) his or her works and therefore bypass these kinds of inane copyright laws. Granted, one could simply make their works public domain, but you still would need some public protections. (Like, you might want to make your stuff freely available, but you don't want others taking credit for it. Or, you just might not want anyone else to make money off of it either.)
Any thoughts?
We know our good allies CHina will avoid this like the plague and we will still get movies on DVD in China Town while the movie is still at theatres....
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
"is designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media."
I suspect that "others" refers to corporations and creators of shoddy encryption systems with enough money to throw at the politicians drafting the treaty to protect them from evil researchers who might discover that Rot-13 isn't that secure after all?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Who are these guys? And who elected/appointed them They Who Shall Decide Intellectual Property Policy For The Rest Of Us?
Seriously, who are they? Who gets selected to be a member, and why?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Disney-Microsoft Corruption Arrangement ?
I just want to be enlightened:-)
and was used to justify the passage of the DMCA
And now the DCMA will be used to justify the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.
"is designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media"
Does that mean artists will now get paid decent royalties instead of the lion's share going to the suits?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Only 30 countries have ratified it. There are circa 200 floating around, and a hell of a lot of them, including Russia and China, don't pay any attention whatsoever to copyright at the moment. I can believe that they might, as countries, receive more income from the pirate business than they would if they forced people to only buy legitimate versions.
There'll always be data havens, never fear.
Maybe China will, for once, actually help stem the tide, since they have such lax laws. Now that they're a member of the WTO, maybe they can actually make a moderating stand against this, or something.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
As it stands currently, copyright law is *almost* international.
Each nation has their own copyright laws, but almost all are either:
1) parties to the Berne Copyright Convention
or
2) Members of the World Trade Organisation
If your country belongs to either of these, it is already bound by a pseudo-international copyright law.
The only countries not parties to these two conventions probably don't care much about copyright to begin with.
So, I don't think that an international treaty will change very much at all.
I fail to see how this is a problem (and I'm not trying to troll). If someone is capable of claiming "rights" on some physical artifact that they created then why shouldn't someone be able to claim rights on some non-physical artifact that they created as well?
For example, the farmer creates carrots, let's say, and has certain rights over the carrots (they belong to him, etc.) and expects to be compensated for expending the effort necessary to create the carrots. Similarly, a musician creates jazz, let's say, and has certain rights over that jazz (it belongs to him/her, etc.) and expects to be able to be compensated for expending the effort necessary to create that jazz.
Where's the difference here? The only difference I see is that carrots have a physical manifestation which limits their ability to be easily duplicated and dispersed among a large audience. Music on the other hand, especially in our digital world, can be easily duplicated. The fact that music can be duplicated doesn't mean that the creator should give up his rights to it. If that is the case then what is the problem in passing a law which protects the creator's rights?
In the United States, the representative to the United Nations is an ambassador, which means the President chooses him or her. I imagine they have to confirmed by the senate, but I don't think it's every much of an issue.
With this, they'll be able to do it no matter where you are. Sadly, the only place where these people might be safe now is Communist China, though 25 years from now that might not be so bad considering the direction we're taking in the West.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
If the wording in the treaty truly says "composers, artists, writers" that's actually a good thing. That would give the actual artists more power over the companies that "own" the rights to their works.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
You can still speek freely all you want. It's just reading, viewing, listening or installing somebody else's speech that's at issue.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything.
Yeah, Mozart would never have composed The Magic Flute without copyright protection. Oh, wait...
Well, I Know Britney 'Jailbait' Spears wouldn't have done quite as well without Copyright law. Um...
Reboot macht Frei.
I THINK what they mean here is that if, for example, you publish a book containing 10 public-domain short-stories or articles, that if someone else comes along and publishes a book with the same 10 public-domain works, that it would be a violation of your copyright to the particular collection you've put together, though the reprinting of none of the individual original public-domain works violates any copyright law...
I think.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The Creative Works Public License would
1.Require representation of the document (even modifications) to clearly indicate the original author.
2. Ban anyone from making money off CWPL'd works, without the author's permission. (I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, this is needed because without it, publishers could just pick books off the net, legally publish them and not have to pay the author. On the other, it doesn't jibe with the GPL)
3. Require that any subsequent or derivitive use also be automatically under the CWPL. (This also doesn't go with the GPL, and I'm not even user if this is a good idea.)
What makes this different from public domain? Well, I still have a legal right to keep my name on things. Also, nobody else can make money on my book by splashing on a new cover. (think about L. Frank Baum and how publishers have raked in the cash without forking a single cent over to his family).
The CWPL could even have a stipulation that derivite works are exempt from the CWPL after the author's death (automatically) or at a specific date that the author specifies. This would leave the opening to make original works under any copy protection scheme we wanted, but only after the author has specified. Still, it would remain illegal for others to make money off the original work, and would require that any copy of the work carry the original author's name.
I'm trying to think of applications and cases where this would be useful and necessary.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
Where do you get off? I find your sweeping generalizations to be both offensively cynical and incorrect! I mean, do you actually know any artists? Meet me, I'm an artist. I mostly subsist on ramen noodles and mac and cheese. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be rich. Please don't tell me I don't exist: my ego might not handle it. (BTW: this is also how a lot of hacker artists lives, e.g. RMS)
It seems the only people who advocate getting rid of intellectual property protections are those who have never created anything and only want to use someone else's work for their own profit.
Ahem... "True invention is a myth. All art is theft -- without reference and past things nothing can be created." -- Malcolm Garrett (artist, designer, look it up)
The problem with the late trend in copyright/IP law is that it cuts out fair use, and makes the creative process one that is fraught with legality and opportunities to litigate. This is not a Good Thing. Litigation is one of the most wasteful, culture-destroying thigns in the world. As Shakespeare said, first thing to we do, we kill all the lawyers. Step one towards utopia, man.
Howard Dean for president
If it hadn't been for the evil hoards plagarizing his plays, they never would have been put down on paper to be read (and hated) by schoolchildren everywhere.
(Then again, Shakespear plagarized his most of the plays attributed him..)
Methinks someone is viewing history through rosy glasses.
They protect the creator in profiting from the art , literature or music they create. If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything. Sure some people will do it, but not on a scale like we have today.
This is one argument for copyrights that's always seemed a little skewed to me. How does getting residual profit from something you've already created encourage you to create more. I mean in programming for instance, the reason most commercial code is written is because the programmer does not get residual income, but rather only gets paid while actively programming. I mean would you continue to work if your company said, 'we'll continue paying you 80k a year for this one program you've written forever." I think the scheme that will lead to people producing more is one in which they are only paid while actively creating.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
I'm glad you settled that issue for us. If the majority of artist create with the goal of being famous and wealthy than they labor under a serious misapprehension since the vast majority will never be either. The fact is the vast majority of art is never rewarded in any financial fashion whatsoever. So if only profitable art were created there would be far less of it.
Intellectual property protections are actually good because they force people to create something better than what exists today. Patents are a perfect example. There are thousands of companies researching new technology to create products that are better and cheaper than what we have today. Without patent protection we would have to rely on the government and universities for research. And since they aren't for profit we would only get things some geek thought up in a lab and would probably have no practical use in the real world.
Kind of sly to mix patents in with copyright since many people have very different feelings on the two things. Muddying the issue only makes your argument look weaker, especially with smearing university researchers. The problem with all your speculation is that it's of the form, if the world were exactly the same except no patents... but the world would be vastly different without a concept of intellectual property. My problem with IP is that it introduces a prior restraint upon me. If I think up a great idea without any outside influences, I can be legally restrained from using just because someone else thought of it first.
No, Edgar "My company comes from a long line of bootleggers" Bronfman, No, and (No), in that order.
For instance, you could ask the same of the WTO. No one knows. No one's telling.
Where do people come up with this crap from? The WTO and the WIPO have member states as their members. For the purpose of the meetings, individual member states appoint representatives to represent them. True, each member state uses its own mechanism to appoint the representatives - which also depends on the level of the conference. Some countries send their ministers (secretaries of state) for the relevant areas while other countries send other higher or lower ranking officials.
The WTO and WIPO are (very influiential) non-governmental organizations. That's the problem at the moment: they're really accountable to no one other then their fat-cat corporate sponsors.
Nonsense. These are international organizations just like the UN. Countries are members - they send people who represent their interests to the forums for discussion. Ultimately it is the government of the country that is responsible for the decisions they agree to and in a democracy the government is accountable to the people - in other forms of government whatever checks or balances (or lack thereof) is who the respective governments are acountable to.
I really wish some idiots would read what they are protesting before protesting it. The majority of the WTO protesters were clueless idiots like the parent poster who have no idea what the WTO was about.
Mmmm.. Donuts
While there's certainly pitfalls to treating music like software, I think there's benefits in terms of clarification of rights.
When I buy software, I get physical media (which is becoming less and less important) and a license to use the software in certain ways. Music could be released under all sorts of different licenses - maybe in several versions at once (per client/seat, free, free-but-no-internet-sharing, etc...)
Now here's the question: Is this a serious suggestion, or am I poking fun at how bad software licenses are? Will the idiot who's been marking all my posts as flamebait find me here?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I would also point out to the /. Linux users that without intellectual property protecion the GPL would not be enforcable.
With reasonable IP protection, the first things put under the GPL would soon be public domain, but newer additions to the original version would still have several years of protection left.
That would be a fair price to pay.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
I, for one, don't really know how to feel about this. It seems that the same laws designed to protect me (my company develops software that is protected by these laws) sometimes seem to stab me in the back (I wish the old Napster was back!).
I seem to find myself wishing that I could select which portion of these laws and treaties that apply to me and ignore the rest.
I doubt I am the only one that feels this way. I was angry at the RIAA and others that shut down the Napster that I knew and loved, but I was probably more angry at the people caught with millions of copies of my company's software.
So in reality, I don't know what to think about this. I see a need to protect what people create, but I also see how this is taken way too far. Unfortunately, I have little hope that reason and sanity will come from an international group of politicians.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
Actually, Mozart was quite thoroughly compensated for his work. The great musicians of the time were usually signed by a benefactor, generally a Lord/King/Noble of some sort, then kept on commission for producing works of art. I've forgotten who was Mozart's benefactor, but he most certainly did work for profit. This was true not just in music, but in many fields--Machiavelli, for example, was at one point patronized by the Medici family.
As to Britney, I don't think she has been helped so much by copyright as she has by a huge marketing arm and the mindless sheep^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H American public, most notably the teenage male market (not to pick on the guys, see also: N*SYNC, et al.).
In any event, allowing the artist the opportunity to make money from his art seems only right--he is creating something, the consuming public is availing itselvf of his work, why shouldn't he have that opportunity? If you choose to create and distribute for free, that's your choice--you're welcome to it (please don't come to me for support vis-a-vis welfare, however); if somebody else decides that they want to be paid for their work, why should they be prevented from doing so?
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
Where do you get off? I find your sweeping generalizations to be both offensively cynical and incorrect!
Me, too. I've mentioned this before, but as Allen Ginsberg said, artists don't have to make a living from their art and they don't have to create all the time. Shakespear didn't make a living writing, he made one acting. William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet and was very happy with that. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive because he realized he wasn't going to make any kind of living in literature, even though he was good. It didn't stop him from writing. Only an idiot starves in a garret somewhere; the rest of us work at what we can find, and often it enriches our art by doing so.
If you read a book, there is no license
I think this is because book and music publishers have been around a lot longer than the software industry, and have connections to the government, so when they want to change their "license" they just get the changes passed directly into law, skipping the license stuff.
Just wait until Microsoft gets into lobbying full gear. Their multipage EULA's will probably be the default license for all software.
That's like saying that Ford has no incentive to create cars without protection from GM makeing them too. That belief is stupid.
Before touting the wealth and industry it creates, I wish you would go back and take a look at the American plantation masters - they created alot of wealth and industry too! (of course, while in theory anyone could own slaves - the reality was that only a tiny pertentile actually did - sound familiar?)
It seems the only people who advocate getting rid of intellectual property protections are those who have never created anything and only want to use someone else's work for their own profit.
Hypocrite! 99.9% of everything you know was likely copied from someone else!
Intellectual property protections are actually good because they force people to create something better than what exists today.
Hey, Linux seems to be getting better every day without this force - unless you want to count the GPL ;)
Patents are a perfict example...
Yeah they are - like the AIDS patents, and the African nations that were sued in the world court for breaking them, and the 10 million Africans who are dying of AIDS who couldn't afford the royalties.
Under these regs, the library has the access under WIPO to all that copy-protected stuff. Even if you are obliged to be a public library, you can have some very interesting opening hours!
See my journal, I write things there
Has *every* single person in the world forgotten what copyright is for?!?!?! Copyright isn't there 'to protect artists', it's there to encourage people to create stuff, and thereby expand the public domain. The point of copyright is that if people have a limited opportunity to exclusively sell their work, more people will create. It has *nothing* to do with protecting a person's 'right' (?) to monopolise and control creative output.
If only that _were_ true! It would only really apply to major label, record industry sessions expected to produce a lot of money- it would be an interesting sideshow to the spectacle of an industry devouring itself.
People often behave as though the record industry, being a big-money cartel, is the only game in town- and to an extent that's true, but developing the habit of playing IP hardball so much is a self-destructive action. Wouldn't it be interesting if you _couldn't_ produce real serious art for the record industry because the only music you could record anymore was written by committee and run through gauntlets of lawyers before release?
Every good story has been told thousands of times, every good bit of melody echoes through history- it's HOW you tell it, HOW you play it that matters. But if every story and note is cordoned off with barbed-wire fences put up and massive lawyer onslaughts made on 'copiers', the only possible result is that the 'legal' music will just absolutely suck... because GOOD music has been done, over and over, and increasingly IP holders are gaining the ability to effectively prohibit 'copiers' from building on that foundation. Seriously, I'd love to see some reference on your claim about jazz musicians being stopped during sessions. Do you mean stopped from making derivative songs, or even more insanely, actually interrupted during soloing? Please follow up with some kind of confirmation that you're not just making this up- it is actually quite important, with huge implications for the future of the record industry. Sort of 'live by the lawyer, die by the lawyer' kind of thing. If you're correct, they'll be LEGALLY incapable of holding on to their cartel as their product quality inevitably drops to below indie-garage-musician levels. It's not that indies will get so much better- the majors will continue to get worse!
Apparently everyone missed the sarcasm. Here, I'll use these<sarcasm></sarcasm>
Reboot macht Frei.
And I can tell you this- perhaps sometimes I'd like to be able to afford better tools, but that is toward an end- I can IMAGINE. Bits of other people's music leave flaming trails across my imagination, leave me wanting more, wanting to say, "OK, give me something like THAT- but MORE SO!" It could be a serene beautiful melody or it could be a wall of brutal overloaded guitar, bass and drums hitting like a hammer to the head- but I'll hear it and go WHOA! Did you hear THAT? Play it again!
And in my own music I'll want to not simply copy THAT, but to take it a step or two beyond, make it my own, as always unsatisfied with what seemed wonderful yesterday.
It's about having an insatiable hunger for pictures in sound (or pictures in pictures, for visual artists), being able to imagine a thing and determined that the imagined thing MUST exist. Sometimes when you create it, it's not as good as you'd hoped, but so what? On to the next thing.
Explain why I would be less hungry for the next picture in sound should there be no prospect of other people paying me to do it.
furrfu.
You know, it really looks like a good recipe for a legal "vaccine" against DMCA-like legislation. Let's say country Y decides to conform to the treaty by establishing an upping to copyright violation penalties IF circumvention measures were used in the process of violating (e.g. a pirate DVD ring that uses DeCSS to create nonencrypted versions of CSS-protected movies). Multiply penalties, say, by 1.5. Developing, using and distributing DeCSS, per se, would still be legal.
I could live with that.
(oh, and it's articles 11 and 12, not 10 and 11.)
Then again, the language of the treaty is scaringly vague. Countries CAN get themselves to comply without DMCA-izing themselves, but WILL they?
You're right, copyrights are good.
But have you looked at these news laws and treaties? They're not about copyright. We already had copyright laws. These are something new to change what people are and are not allowed to do.
Look at how the DMCA was used. What does creating a monopoly on DVD players (which is what ther eis, when every DVD lpayer maker much get a license from a single central authority) have to do with copyright? A monopoly on a specific DVD's content, I can understand -- that's what copyright is. But where do they get off leveraging monopolies into new markets?
Another atrocity: Why is Skylarov in jail when he didn't do anything even tangentially related to copyright violation? It wasn't even the dubious "contributory infringement." These fuckers are creating new crimes!
And one other thing to think about: Where's the public debate? Physical property is a natural law. (We humans aren't the only ones who have it -- lions and tigers and bears have it too. Hang out in a tiger's territory if you don't believe me.) But we (society) invented IP because it serves a purpose that we want. There is dissent, but as a whole, society said Yes Please to copyright law. But these new ones -- society didn't say anything at all, except maybe, "We're not paying attention to the changes you guys are making, so it's ok to screw us."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://opencontent.org
Good! I didn't want to write this anyway!
Yeah, Mozart would never have composed The Magic Flute without copyright protection. Oh, wait...
He might have, and he might not have. If we can assume a world where copyright does not exist, then there's really no money that will get thrown around. When Mozard comes out with his new piece, all the conductors in Europe will shamelessly yoink a copy and get their orchestras to play it, taking the money for themselves. Now, that means that composing can only be done as a hobby.
But then again, copyright in Mozart's time != copyright in our time. Copyright probably only extended at most ten years for Mozard, but today it's over ninty-five! No one needs a ninty-five year copyright period! As one of my friends put it: "If you're not contributing anything new in ten years, you don't deserve to be making money."
Well, I Know Britney 'Jailbait' Spears wouldn't have done quite as well without Copyright law.
Britnet Spears is a whore who's selling point is her breast implants. <sarcasm>I wish my mom would've gotten me implants for my sixteenth birthday</sarcasm>. People see Spears because they want get a lap dance and jack off, so her income is as secure as any porn star at your local stripper's club, and it really isn't tied to her music at all.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
If I am reading this right and it is true, Napster is dead thanks to greed. If they had been a not for profit library they would be untouched?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Oh, sure. Vote the BQ in. Your province would be part of the larger half of the country in a seperation situation. Just ignore us Maritimers. Don't worry, we don't mind. We've been treated like shit so often we're used to it.
By the way, thanks for helping out with increased transfer payments to improve our dead ecomony. After all, we helped you folks out in the great depression with loads of food so you wouldn't starve.
Oh, what's that? Right! You didn't help out with increased transer payments. Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. We're used to being treated like shit. Don't worry, go back to your booming economy and good ecomony. We'll just quietly sit here and work for our minimum wage jobs seasonal jobs and hope a future federal government takes pity on us by improving transfer payments so we can cut our taxes so companies decide to start *real* jobs here.