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WIPO Music Control Treaty Ratified
Greyfox writes: "Here's one that slipped through the cracks. The WIPO (You know, that unelected, unaccountable organization that lives in the Corporate back pockets) has ratified a anti-music piracy treaty which will go into effect on May 20. It apparently has anti-circumvention measures similar to the DMCA and will carry the force of law in the USA and other member countries." We had a more informative story about these two treaties a few months ago. The only new information is that the Phonograms and Performances Treaty now has enough signatures to go into effect in May.
WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. I don't know exactly what it is, it just sounds evil =].
Although the treaties were adopted in 1996, they are only ratified now with the signature of Honduras. The WTTP is basically the DMCA for the rest of the world. It exists to "provide protection for companies in the cultural and information industries".
I can feel my sanity, beyond my reach and slipping...
For those of you who can't open MSWord .docs here are the countries signed on:
Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Namibia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Panama, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Senegal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, United Kingdom, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela, European Communities (50).Albania, Argentina, Belarus, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Gabon, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Saint Lucia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United States of America (28).
Regards
I like teamwork. It's easier to assign blame that way.
According to cnn.com "Both treaties [WTO and WTTP] were adopted in 1996." Was Bush in charge in 96?
Treaties don't contain punishment for offenders, laws do. Me, an individual citizen of the US, who breaks RandomTreaty#10283 ratified by the US which has no enforcement law in the US has little to nothing to worry about.
That's why there is the DMCA. It exists to enforce a treaty and supply punishment.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I'm not up on the WIPO treaties, but my take from the CNN article (which may be inaccurate) is that the treaties lack operative clauses. Think about it as the content provider's version of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but when push comes to shove, the Chinese whack all the dissidents they want anyway.
;)
So the WIPO treaties may recognize rights, but they don't offer significant remedies to enforce them.
I can't imagine a treaty with operative anti-circumvention provisions couldn't get through WIPO without more noise than we've heard... though I'll have to take a look at them.
Besides, if it was really bad, we would be knee-deep in indignant press releases from the EFF.
Your argument is missing some distinctions.
First, "countries" are not atomic entities. There are interest groups within them. The RIAA/MPAA + media giants have their allies within many of the signatory countries. They would like nothing more than to control content and the means of distributing content completely. They would also like to control prices, limit competition, and some guranteed income in the form of hardware taxes.
These groups have the advantage of money and organization, but the disadvanatge that many of them live in democratic countries. So to get what they want, they have to do an end run around the democratic process. One way to do this is with economic treaties, which are negotiated in secret, by the very groups who will benefit most from them, and are then passed on to legislatures to be rubber stamped.
Why do the legislatures rubber stamp them? Well, for one thing, the lawmakers tend to be predisposed to favor this stuff in the first place, due to a variety of filters. For instance, in the US, to even be eligable to make a run for congress requires that you raise about $1,000,000/year from wealthy individuals. This means that our representatives are not exactly a "cross-section" of the population. So the lawmakers don't view the public as some group to be served, but as an annoying constituency which should be kept quiet and under control. I'm generalizing here, but the principle is fairly accuarate. In other countries there are other filters, of varying restrictiveness.
Moreover, the media doesn't highlight these amendments. Where was the huge public debate about the Telecommunications Act? Where was the public debate about the DMCA? Why do these agreements slip under the radar? There is little discussion of them in the media -- unless through leaks or lack of control word spreads anyways, and then there is a rush to defend them. So the Nafta debate, which was caused only because Perot -- who can buy his own air time -- forced the issue onto the airwaves. And then there was a rush by the NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. to villify him and to not present the opposing views.
Finally there is the method of bundling, by which these agreements are presented to congress without possibility to amend them, as part of a larger package, for a straight up or down vote. Threats of boycotts, higher tariffs, cutting of loans/aid are big clubs than can be used against other countries to get them to sign. But the key point is that the legislatures generally want to sign these things, and the aforementioned threats are provided as cover for them to say to their citizens -- "we had to do it."
At the end of the day, you end up paying taxes when you buy a hard drive, and the police can arrest you for reverse engineering, even if your goal is to interoperate, or just provide a lower price substitute.
I recommend reading an article about the derailed Multilateral Agreement on Investements to see this dynamic at work. In the case of the MAI, media leaks, mostly on the internet, launched a grassroots effort to oppose the provisions of the MAI. This resulted in derailing the agreement as more and more of the provisions came to light, and public hearings in several countries were called. A brief excerpt:
The [Wall Street] journal goes on to urge that it will be necessary "to drum up business support" so as to beat back the hordes [of people opposed to the MAI]. Until now, business hasn't recognized the severity of the threat. And it is severe indeed. "Veteran trade diplomats" warn that with "growing demands for greater openness and accountability," it is becoming "harder for negotiators to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments." "Instead, they face pressure to gain wider popular legitimacy for their actions by explaining and defending them in public," no easy task when the hordes are concerned about "social and economic security," and when the impact of trade agreements "on ordinary people's lives...risks stirring up popular resentment" and "sensitivities over issues such as enviromental and food safety standards." It might even become impossible "to resist demands for direct participation by lobby groups in WTO decisions, which would violate one of the body's central principles": "'This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups,' says a former WTO official."
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
An freakin' half the jobs in the Ukraine are still provided by gov't-sanctoined CD factories ripping U.S. content and reselling it at a fraction of the cost.
Uncle Sam may be an 400 kilo gorilla, but he can be impotent sometimes too.
I don't think the Ukraine is your best example.
Here is the only language in the treaty concerning anti-circumvention measures:
A Contracting Party is a country that has signed the treaty. Note that the above language only requires countries to punish people who used a technological measure to violate a performer's rights, that is, to punish people who use technological measures to do piracy. A signer is not obliged to implement something like the DMCA; a far narrower law would suffice to comply with the treaty.
Here's an interesting little snipped from Article VI of the US Constitution that most of you probably didn't know about (emphasis mine):
This Constitution... and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.
The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. This means that if a WIPO treaty trumps the First Amendment, you're up a creek.
Back in the 1950's there was a bill floating around Congress known as the Bricker Amendment that would have forbade Congress from ratifying a treaty (only requires 2/3 of the Senate) that would require a constituational amendment to do otherwise (which requires 2/3 of both houses and then 2/3 of the states). It didn't pass. Do a Google for more info.
This means that a group of people who we don't have any control over for six years at a time can trump the Constitution whenever 67 of them agree to. (Yet another reason to repeal the 17th, probably.)
There's been a new interest in the Bricker Amendment in recent years from the political right and other groups, but I don't think anything's been really done about it.
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Perhaps if we all wrote to our Congresscritters and Senators and bitched about the lack of such a law protecting us from abuses in WIPO and WTO something might get done about it.
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from Article 2: Definitions...
(b) "phonogram" means the fixation of the sounds of a performance or of other sounds, or of a representation of sounds other than in the form of a fixation incorporated in a cinematographic or other audiovisual work;
(c) "fixation" means the embodiment of sounds, or of the representations thereof, from which they can be perceived, reproduced or communicated through a device;
(d) "producer of a phonogram" means the person, or the legal entity, who or which takes the initiative and has the responsibility for the first fixation of the sounds of a performance or other sounds, or the representations of sounds;
If would appear that if a musician were to make a cassette recording of a song before going into the studio, their producer would in fact not have intellectual property rights to it.
IF this is the case, then the WIPO just managed to shoot themselves in the foot.
Article 21
Reservations
Subject to the provisions of Article 15(3), no reservations to this Treaty shall be permitted.
It would also appear, juding from article 21, that if any section of the treaty conflicts with national law and is struck down, that the entire treaty is rendered null and void. OR (depending on how you read it) that the treaty in fact overrides any national law (DMCA) and in agreeing to this treaty, the nationality agrees to either reform or abolish any law that conflicts with it.
Article 28
Signature of the Treaty
This Treaty shall be open for signature until December 31, 1997, by any Member State of WIPO and by the European Community.
Also going on to Article 28, did the treaty get the required 30 signatures before December 31, 1997?
If not then it would appear that the entire teaty is null and our lawmakers have been wasting our money and time
(like this is anything new).
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Suck out capital?
If only they were so nice.
No, the SOA and CIA go in there and put in a nice fascist puppet government until the dictator feels his police state built by the US is strong enough to resist the US. Then we go replace him with another. And so on. In the name of democracy.
Or if they're lucky, the impoverished nation turns to the IMF to loan them money in return for certain conditions which will lock the country in debt and poverty and reliant on foreign capital.
There are plenty of other versions; consult your local library.