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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.
(You know, that unelected, unaccountable organization that lives in the Corporate back pockets)
WIPO is a treaty. If one of the 177 countries is unhappy about being part of the WIPO treaty, they can leave. So the fact that a country is part of WIPO is indicitive of the will of the lawmaking body of the country. Furthermore, the treaty had to be ratified by each country, so it was elected. And to say that it lives in corporate back pockets indicates that you don't know much about WIPO. While it has capitalist goals, it is by no means controled by any company in any country.
My email is real.
Hopefully music will get wrapped in enough red tape to drown out Britney & Westlife
The musicians are just as guilty as the record companies and the RIAA and the rest of them. No-one forces you to sign to Sony Music or Thorn EMI.
There's so much great music out there that's not distributed by the big corps you know, you don't *HAVE* to buy stuff from them.
Let them do wtf they like with their music, who cares, let them drown in their own decadence.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The pessimist in me wants to say "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" - the next step to a corporation-controlled digital age.
Maybe (maybe) it will get better before it gets really bad, but reality's shaping up a lot like this.
Can anybody point a link to a list of all the countries that have so far bought into this?
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
Are you trolling?
This treaty has been SHOVED down the throats of the "177 countries" by threats of catastrophic loss of trade agreements and obscene tolls by the USA. It's a "you're either with out entertainment industry or you're against us" treaty.
The owls are not what they seem
Do you really think, that when the 800-lb. Gorilla
USA waves the boycott-flag, you have a choice not to sign the treaty?!
johnboy
Just because the treaty was ratified by 177 countries doesn't mean it was democratic. After all, what does the US do if we don't like other countries' policies? We strongarm investors to suck all their capital out of the country until they do what we tell them to. And if they go along with our policies, we reward them (or at least their corrupt leaders) with massive loans from the World Bank or IMF.
The point is that these policies are getting more universal and more severe. Take a look at the article last week about the Chinese government's firewall built by eager US corporations. We're getting to the point where the internet no longer guarantees that information will be free (like speech or beer).
Between laws enforcing intellectual property, technology that can monitor and censor internet traffic, and governments cracking down on terrorism and digital theft, we risk losing the promise of the internet.
International treaties like this one are as important to the slashdot community as anything Bill Gates or George Bush does.
(Now we just have to find effective ways to fight back)
Teaching, coding, coffee, revolution.
It's bad enough that there are some great foreign films that will be probably never viewed in the United States because they are a different region (which negates travelling and legally buying the DVD and brining it back) and distributors do not consider the films worthy enough to port over to region 1. But to think that one day people might be denied exposure to music from the world's many cultures for the same reason is barbaric.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The US is not just one "it". One of the benefits of the US constitution is separation of powers -- a great deal of cooperation is required for Congress to do anything; hence, in theory, laws are made quite slowly and only when they have support of most of the country (or, at least, people representing most of the country).
The treaty-making process doesn't allow the same level of scrutiny -- the Executive branch is involved in their creation and the Senate gets little more choice than approve/deny. The House of Representatives (which tends to be closer to the public in terms of receiving feedback) has no place in the process whatsoever. The gist of this (even excluding the harm done to non-American participants) is that law is being made without the benefit of the full set of protections written into the US constitution, and thus that even if that segment of the public that cares is opposed to such a treaty, it's harder for that fact to reach those involved (and easier for those responsible for ratification to call destructive clauses something they couldn't get rid of lest the baby go with the bathwater -- after all, they only had the ability to confirm or deny the whole treaty!)
In short, making law via treaties is a loophole entirely unanticipated by the Constitution, and an amendment (or Supreme Court ruling) is needed to abolish it.
Is that there is nowhere to flee too. If you want a country with electricity, medical resources, and lack of local warfare then you're stuck with the vast majority of these crappy treaties.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
That's it, since most of my personal effects are music recordings, I now OWN virtually nothing.... and since I'm a musician, did I mention that any attempt to gain a wider audience will result in some huge, monolithic corporation dictating what I can play.... Just licensed to a slimy tentacle of the great machine that'll control all of us in 10 years or so...
In the meantime, I plan to move somewhere out of the way and raise sheep. Call me when it's time to mechanically tattoo the barcode on my forehead.
Since the US signed the treaty saying they would agree to it. America can walk away from it anytime our government chooses to, however. But until they do, we are obligated to fulfill the terms of the treaty.
Especially when our Constitution overrules it.
Can you show us which part of the Constitution prevents our government from signing treaties?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
You don't get to click, you agree to the copyright provisons by purchasing the album. Don't a moronic troll.
i get really sick and tired about hearing about how stupid our elected officials are..
1) I didn't say that they were stupid -- my point was that the topics of debate were limited because of these filters. It's not a personal critique one way or another. Suppose a candidate wants to, say, limit IP rights and reform patent laws significantly. Well -- who would donate to his campaign? How would he raise the money needed to run? He wouldn't and so our representatives don't hold these opinions. So they support things like WIPO. I think that's a fairly straightforward remark.
so what? i pay taxes when i buy milk at the convenience store. what's the problem?
2) I was talking about paying "taxes" which are surcharges on storage media. The money goes to the content cartels. I'm not against paying taxes either, but they shouldn't go to private, unacountable monopolies. And I should have some say in how the money is spent. And the process should be decided on democratically. Is the saying "No taxation without representation" to radical for you?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Pretty much everything you've said relates to the flaws in the US lawmaking process
...
Yes:) I am an American. The little I know of the situation in the EU is that there are similar filters. There they take the form of a more class(and so wealth) based beauracracy which is so byzantine that no one can police it, and removed from popular influence by ever-increasing administrative layers. In the third world, with exceptions, politics are much more violent and dealing with popular pressures is not so much of an issue.
That's 1/177 down. The parent's post is still accurate: WIPO resolutions, like those of all other international bodies, require ratification by member-states before they have force of law. Think of WIPO et al like you would the W3C
Here in California, we have some direct democracy in the form of propositions each election cycle. We're routinely blitzed by commercials from groups such as "Concerned Citizens for Environmental Responsibility". If you read the bylaws of these groups, they claim to be just that -- a grassroots campaign to educate the public about environmental issues. But it's easy to see that the above group, say, is actually a front for oil companies who want to enable off shore drilling. It only exists to pass/derail some resolution and has a membership which you can count on your hand. Now, you can argue that if we democratically elect members to this group of concerned citizens, that the organization might be reformed and would then serve some useful purpose. I just have no idea why anyone would want to do that (see end of rant).
This is pretty much the case with WIPO. Statements like "the US is only 1/177 of WIPO" " and "Corporations influence it only to the extent that they influence the member states" are only true in the actual WIPO bylaws, and --possibly -- some political science articles.
In reality the US must be atleast 2/3 of WIPO (in terms of influence) and Europe maybe 1/3 -- the rest of the world, including China, constitutes a rounding error. And in terms of corporate influence, it's not only that the actual proposals are negotiated/written by corporate attorneys, many of whom don't even bother to take on govt. jobs, but most top governmental officials are unaware of what these lawyers agree to. This includes congressional chairs of foreign trade, although I imagine that the Bush Administration's top trade executive is occasionally briefed on the matter.
In fact, the very existence of an orginization called "WIPO" already prejudices the situation, since the natural course of all developed countries has been to ignore (foreign) IP laws entirely -- except possibly limited rights of attribution. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the US began to pay lip service to any foreign IP rights at all. And not until after WWI, when we confiscated many patents from Germany, did we even begin to take foreign IP rights seriously. Currently, even in the more developed countries, foreign IP rights were (and are) ignored on a selective basis. And so just the desire to codify and enforce IP laws worldwide is already a huge slap in the face of development efforts going on in the third world, and has no popular support in those countries.
This is not like W3C or the UN; and it's difficult to imagine what a "democratic" world wide IP regime might be, other than some statement to the effect of "There should not be a worldwide IP regime".
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.