Slashdot Mirror
Global Cyber Copyright Treaty In Force Today
Guinnessy writes: "The Financial Times has a short story on a global copyright treaty that comes into force today, despite controversy over whether it will help or hinder creativity on the internet. You can find an actual copy of the treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organisation."
Throughout the world, especially Article 12.
As for stifling creativity, any legislation of this type will have this effect, due to fear or actual litigation.
As you can see in the article, in several years the developed countries will patent everything. After that the developing contries will be simply the slaves of America.com
" Don't think, we already a patented you thougths "
Fuck you and your space limits
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And obviously biased. Everyone but the few hundred music/movie executives that stand to profit from this are biased. We have passed the DMCA and will ratify this treaty for benifit of a few hundred people.
There are 6 billion people on the planet and hardship caused to less than a thousand does not warrant an international treaty.
If it impacted a million people adversly, it would not warrent a treaty.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
get invaded by the U.S. over bootleg Britney Spears cds? Bootleg booty? How do they plan on enforcing this anyway?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Read Article 8
Well, this gives the MPAA and the RIAA one more lobbying tool to get their way.
Copyright holders get to choose where and when you get to see their IP.
The good thing about this, is that I'm going to start copyrighting my phone calls. And then I can just use the agreed statment on article 8 that "the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not in itself amount to communication" as an excuse for not answering my phone.
Obligations concerning Technological Measures
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law."
I wonder how many RIAA and MPAA dollars went it to that one? This gives all contries the mandate to implement SSSCA- and DCMA-like laws. I, for one, am very dissapointed in the WIPO."effective legal remedies"
I'll just go hide under a rock, until someone copyrights rocks as their "artistic expression" and I'll have to move.
rxvt, suse, vi, solaris, debian, java, c, feel the love. #unix@IRCnet, #gimp & #gnome@GIMPnet
Secondly, when the say "computer programs are copyrightable works," do they mean binaries, or source code? I don't know, and I'm not certain they're sure what they meant when they wrote it.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
So anyone near Geneva wants to do a protest at the WIPO offices or will I be alone? ;)
Seriously, that's really sad that such texts could be accepted. If you're a coder and have made softwares that could be used as a copy protection circumvention device (even if they have legitimate uses). You're now more than ever in danger due to the articles 11 and 12 of this treaty.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
And it's about circumvention of act "which are not authorized". In France, for example, copyright laws[Code de la Propriete Intellectuelle, in French sorry] have already been updated. But we still have the right to reverse-engineer something to understand how it works or to make it interoperable (Art. 122-6-1). And we still have the right for a safeguard copy (same article).
And it's not about diffusion of information on how to circumvent, which are legal in France (Art. 122-6-2). So, really not a DMCA-like.
So, not really such a fuss.
And finally, what is really the value of an international treaty ?
This has been hashed thrice before in other /. posts.
Fiction is a Short Story. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Poe.
An ARTICLE is what the link refers to.
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn (10/2/96)
"Last September 12, some 1,500 of Hollywood's most beautiful people mustered at Greenacres, the old Harold Lloyd estate in Beverly Hills, and listened to Barbra Streisand serenade Bill Clinton..."
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
WIPO Troll has an office now? I thought he lived in a toiletbowl...
Where's the WIPO Troll when you need him...?
As the article not so clearly states. The treaty came first, then the same fine folks who wrote the treaty for WIPO wrote the DMCA for the US. Don't worry, once the bugs are worked out, they will run "DMCA v2.0" through babelfish and then trot the "localized versions" off to be rubberstamped by all the other WIPO members.
Please remember that the purpose of the treaty, and the WIPO international patent system is not to stifle creativity. The purpose is to facilitate the commerce of ideas by having a simple single point of reference to check for ownership of all intellectual property. Everyone is still just as free to create as they were before, but if your creation builds on the IP of others, then they will be protected from being damaged by the dissemination of your obviously derivative works.
That this new IP "clearinghouse" might turn out to be biased in favor of the organizations that pay its bills is completely irrelevant.And so is the fact that whenever I see WIPO I think of it as a "professional" version of the IOC, and the sort of organization that ICANN wishes it were.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I'll be the first to admit that this whole thing confuses me. Yet, I don't really know any details behind the WIPO or the DMCA, so it's no surprise that this is going to blow right past me.
But as a media production major at UNC Chapel Hill, I need to understand this stuff, because obviously it will affect my future work one day.
It appears to me that this treaty is way too broad, and will only cause problems. I'm gonna try and explain some of these as good as I can guess at them, and I'd appreciate if someone would clear me up on this.
Ok, so if a record company puts its music library online, then that will show the courts that there is an original source online which the copyrighted/pirated material came from. This will help lawyers for record companies in court protect their copyrights.
Well, it seems like there would still be a way around this with different formats out there. However, the fact that copyright protection extends to "expressions", then they could cancel that idea out. However, it seems like that would fringe on a LOT of our established rights.
I've got plenty more to question and talk about, but I'm headed down for food...leave me some comments and then I'll be back shortly for more!
A WIPO treaty is not binding on anybody unless your national government passes appropriate laws in your jurisdiction. Laws like the DMCA in the USA. No such laws have been passed by the EU or in the UK, we just need to ensure that position holds true in the rest of the work.
It is worth considering that this treaty has exactly the same authority as the UN Charter on Human Rights, and look how widely obeyed that is!
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures ... and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not ... permitted by law.
This isn't the DMCA, exactly. The DMCA appears to restrict fair use, whereas this WIPO treaty only restricts actions that are "not ... permitted by law." Notwithstanding 17 USC 1201, fair use is still not an infringement of copyright. This treaty states only that countries have to prohibit acts of circumvention that result in copyright infringement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Whoa there!
I could take the time to make a point by point refutation of your comments (complete with bullet points even!), but instead let me just say that your browser apparently did not process my sarcasm tags properly.
I clearly understand WIPO and its supporting treaties and legislation to be a hobnailed boot on the neck of all who would threaten to bypass current power structures (and the forunes of those who benefit from them) via technological advances.
Naturally, those with power will (ab)use that power. So of course Disney et al will put ever longer advertising messages on their DVDs, and via the current control systems require you to sit through them since the fast forward and chapter skips will be disabled. There is a market based feedback mechanism at work here - if they try to ram too much down our throats at once it will backfire on them. It will take a few years to nurture sufficient arrogance in the people making the decisions as to how much advertising is too much. Then we will see some idiot sell advertising in the last 30 seconds of each DVD chapter - with FF disabled - and this will fail miserably, but there will not be a product recall. Ten years later interchapter advertising will be the norm.
You have not purchased unlimited rights to view/listen to a work. You implied that you have, but until you get a WTO court decision to back you up you have nothing but your rather naive belief against the legally codified property rights of the corporate marketplace.
Things may well not be as bleak as I am painting them. I seem to recall that some of the "rich and powerful" are starting to wonder if they have gone too far. Even if they do make the decision to "ease up" a bit, these sort of institutionalized movements have really enormous inertia... kind of like big dinosaurs recognizing the threat of itsy bitsy mammals - and ignoring that asteroid on a collision course with Yucatan.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't