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.

Comments

Who Are These Guys?

[ewhac]

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

Small fry

[seizer]

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.

This is NOT a SPAM

[ackthpt]

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Re:I fail to see...

[artdodge]

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.

That's exactly the difference, and it's a big one. I think it was Ben Franklin who said that an idea is set apart from a physical commodity in that you are no way impoverished when you give it away. If I give away my carrots, I have no carrots. If I give away an idea, I still have just as much access to and use of that idea as I had before it was shared. Hence the popular "Information wants to be free" meme.

I tend to be mistrustful of copyright in the vein of Jefferson; historically, copyright was implicitly joined to the idea of physical embodiments and copies, which allowed for a reasonably balanced approach. But when objects of copyright are trivially disembodied, and "to copy" is something that gets done internally 10 times over in the basic handling of a copyrighted work to begin with (server copies it off of disk into buffer cache; copies it from buffer cache to network stack; from network stack to ethernet card; copied over a series of store-and-forward routers; copied from client network stack to client application; copied and manipulated within client application to decode; copied to kernel buffer; copied from kernel buffer to audio card), we need to look for a new abstraction instead of "copying" on which to hang IP law.

What utter nonsense

[donutello]

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.