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WIPO Broadcast Treaty Creates New Legal Rights for Broadcasters
An anonymous reader writes "WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Organization) created by the UN is now creating a new copyright for 'broadcast transmissions' giving broadcasters ownership of the content that they broadcast (even if the program being broadcast is in the public domain). IP Justice has created a Top 10 List of
reasons to reject this proposal and has published a detailed report that dissects the proposal from a civil liberties and freedom of expression point
of view." See our previous story for more information.
See the Union for the Public Domain. We're also working on these issues and have summaries of WIPO proceedings and an analysis of the treaty.
AMEN brother.
Also this needs to also go and cover the situation between radio stations and record companies. Do you know that radio stations have to PAY the record companies per song, despite the fact that the stations is doing multiple services for the record company. They track songs, tell which are good, provide free advertising for the cd, and usually provide encouragement for people to buy the CD's.
This new WOFO group would make it free for radio stations to use ANY song as long as they provide those services mentioned above!
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Really this isn't much different from a record company deciding to produce a CD of work so old that it is out of copyright. They would have copyright on the arrangement of bit on the CD, but not on the underlying work. This treaty seems to be an attempt to bring things into line with this, to be honest.
Or alternatively you can take a copy of a Dickens novel and reproduce the words (since they are out of copyright) but you can't simply photocopy a recently printed copy of the novel and distribute that without breaching copyright.
The constitution always superscedes any international treaty. The order is this:
1) Constitution
2) Treaty approved by both president and congress
3) Law passed by Congress
4) Treaty approved only by president
However, international treaty is held to supersede the constitution, thus conveniently bypassing any constitutional protections in place.
In what dreamworld? the constitution is the supreme law. International treaties themselves are just paper - it is only local laws that implement those treaties that hold any force, and they are also subject to the constitution.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I used to think that, but someone corrected me and I did some research.
In reality, treaties are given equal precedence with federal law (in case of conflict, whichever treaty or law was ratified/passed most recently takes priority).
The Constitution has higher precedence than either treaties or federal law.
The bigger problem is that we've gotten very, very sloppy about enforcing the Constitution as written.
DNA just wants to be free...
I wish, in criticizing WIPO's physics, that IP Justice had at least gotten their own physics right. In #2 on their top 10, and elsewhere on the site, they complain that broadcast signals cannot become "fixed" since "broadcast signals exist only in the air and dissolve upon reaching [solid] matter". This is bullshit. I am a physicist. Broadcast signals (e.g. RF) pass right through many solid materials. They are absorbed by other materials to varying degrees. They certainly do not "dissolve" on contact with solid matter, however. By criticizing supposedly-bad physics from WIPO with bad physics of their own, IP Justice just lowers their own credibility.
The WIPO Copyright Treaty was internationally developed back in a time when people, especially politicians, had no grasp of how digital data was an integral part of the modern world. The Internet, and copying of files, was seen as something awfully scary which threatened companies. Old white men fear change, and in 1996 the Internet looked like a pretty wild frontier. WIPO demands that digital data be treated specially, which IMHO is a big mistake. Everything we do these days relies on digital media and copying, an inherent action of computers and networks.
The WIPO was ratified in the United States to create the DMCA, which you all know and love. The similar EU laws, which are just as bent as the US's DMCA, also came from WIPO.
Now Canada is looking at bringing the WIPO, i.e. their own version of the DMCA, into Canadian copyright law. Terrible idea - visit this site if you want to learn more, and exert political pressure to stop this from happening.
You would not own rights to the song, but you would own rights to the broadcast; copyright can have many layers with different people holding the rights to the different layers.
It's analogous to the copyright a printer has in the typesetting of a book. You are infringing copyright if you photocopy a recently typeset Penguin Classic of a public domain work, but not if you transcribe it. You can however photocopy older published books at your leisure.
Another example: Dangermouse infringed on both the Beatles and Jay-Zs copyright in creating the Grey Album but he still holds copyright on that work, e.g. the Beatles or Jay-Z could not just decide to appropriate it and sell it themselves (without his permission).