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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.
I keep wondering how long it will be until we have the completely formed "perfect enemy" -- that combination of totalitarianism and corporatism all rolled together.
I hereby propose the creation of WOFO -- the World Public Domain, Fair Use, Open Content and Free Software Organisation.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
*off to start broadcasting illegal copies of stuff and then re-download it as the owner of those things*
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
as long as they pay me royalty for tresspassing my property with their airwaves without my consent.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Of course I didn't RTFA, but would this mean if I broadcasted the latest RIAA single I would own the rights to a recording of that broadcast? Even if I never owned the rights to the actual songs in the broadcast?
Steal This Sig
This proposal by the UN can, and has been used to define web content distribution.
Seems to indicate that in the case of public domain content, such as a government-created documentary or a very old movie or audio recording--you would not be able to freely store and redistribute that content.
Sigs cause cancer.
11. When I broadcast a fart, I don't want to be legally responsible for damage it does.
Seems to me that this goes hand-in-hand with the broadcast flag.
Rob's Rule of Misgovernment: "When idiots write the law, the law will be idiotic."
Perhaps you have noticed that most broadcasters are super imposing their logos and other copyrighted images on your screen. That logo effectively stamps the film that they are broadcasting. They own the logo. You can't copy or distribute that logo without their permission. Therefore, you can't use the film in the background without their permission either.
I'd guess that the MPAA might disagree with the notion of a broadcaster acquiring ownership of a feature film, simply because he broadcast it one night.
Europe seems determined to do away with property rights altogether.
--- Bill
This does suggest that there is anything in the public domain that anyone would want to broadcast.
Considering the vast majority of the public domain is targetted at an audience who were around 95 years ago, and is likely to be highly degraded, or even non-existant, this sounds like a largely academic objetion.
This is how copyright holders are shoving the First Ammendment up our collective asses. Many of the articles in this treaty are patently unconstitutional. However, international treaty is held to supersede the constitution, thus conveniently bypassing any constitutional protections in place.
On Apple Input Peripherals: They're okay, I guess, but I was really hoping for a one-key keyboard and a 109-button mouse
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.
Yes - here in the UK, playing music loudly into the street is considered "broadcasting", and requires the payment of royalties. But then, in the UK, signalling to neighbours across the street by opening your curtains is considered to be "transmitting by the modulation of electromagnetic radiation" and requires a licence, or it certainly used to.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Unfortunately, there's nothing more mind-numbing than international law, particularly regarding intellectual property rights. A cursory read of the linked articles had me praying for death. Can someone objective sum up the issues and present them here, in colloquial English. Thanks. And dear God please no more acronyms.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Peace
Read the list. Go. Now. Look at #10.
The proposed treaty would grant broadcasters the right to stop the original creators from otherwise distributing their work!
That, mes amis, is WRONG.
and maybe guns too. Comms gear and guns. Lots of guns.
This is going to get ugly. A free society needs free information, as Popper elucidated. The neofascists who want control over information flow MUST be stopped. By whatever means necessary, including flaming microwave pulse death.
.. it never ends, agenda 21, the desertification treaty,small arms, abuses by UN troops, issuing bogus vaccines, it never ends, now this amalgamation of bad news
"Article 6 - Right of Retransmission
Article 6 provides broadcasting organizations with an exclusive right to authorize the retransmission by any means of their broadcasts. The phrase "by any means" creates a dangerously broad grant of control over all retransmissions, including rebroadcasting and retransmission by wire, cable, or even over computer networks. This grant is broad enough to include a consumer who is sending a public domain movie through the Internet for non-commercial purposes. By including the redistribution through the Internet of broadcast media, the proposal goes well beyond its stated goal of applying to broadcasting organizations and regulates an enormous breadth of ordinary consumer activity, endangering freedom of expression on the Internet.
And this grant would give the traditional broadcasting industry a competitive advantage over webcasters and other "new-media" retransmitters who discover new and innovative ways of providing entertainment to consumers but will be prevented from doing so because this broad grant forecloses all future means of redistribution that is yet to be discovered.
Article 6 also provides broadcasting organizations with higher levels of protection over broadcasts than the law gives to the actual creators of the content being broadcast. Canada proposed a reservation to Article 6 out of concern that it creates "a situation where the level of protection of broadcasts would exceed the rights of the rightsholders of the content being broadcast."
further down it mentions an ubercopyright-like experience giveing broadcasters 50 years of ownership which *could* be construed to over rule even the original copyright! What masterminds thunked this up?
If that ain't sucky or what! Wonder how much them bozos got paid off for THIS masterpiece!
UN=somewhat decent idea, abysmal implementation, more stoopid and corrupt than most nations out there. Scrap it, start over again, IMO. And put their headquarters over to boogorillaville someplace, NOT inside the US. Let them goombahs enjoy the ambience someplace else.
It can't be done, "global government" would be orders of magnitude even more inefficient and more corrrupt than the soverign nations it wants to replace. We don't need either flavor of NWO, not the corporate axis of profit brand, nor the "stealth" axis of profit brand represented by the UN.
If I brodcast something the IP rights transfer to me?
While UPN owns Star Trek WB dose not own Yugioh. Most brodcasters don't own any of the content they brodcast but liccens it from the actual creators.
As IP law is now the act of creation itself gives you the rights so this dosen't matter if the brodcaster and creater are the same entity but when they are diffrent entitys this could mean a liccens to broudcast becomes a transfer of ownership.
On a side note it's the UNs job to foster peace through out the world. Ecconomic matters such as IP law shouldn't be part of the UN agenda.
Some nations may be cought between the rock of UN IP law that would basicly make there exports illegal and the hard place of the only aternitive of making wepons also banned by the UN.
If the only choice they had was to drop out of the UN I don't believe such a nation would have any market for the peaceful export.
I don't actually exist.
I don't claim to understand all of this, but it seems to either do nothing or do way to much.
Ok, one view says that you are not fixing the signal, you are fixing the "interpretation" of the signal. The signal itself is modulated EMR.
However, the bad physics aside, this seems to prohibit (or allow Broadcasting Organizations (BOs) to prohibit) (nearly?) all recording. No more VCRs. No more time- or space-shifting. As written, this might even apply to a person with a very good memory! If I watch TV on my PC (not common around here, but definately possible), the image gets stored in RAM. Worse yet, it might be swapped onto the hard drive. This would make that illegal. Modern TVs have chips and RAM in them. There is no limitation on how long a fixation has to stick around to be illegal.
There are more examples, but that is more than enough. This is a bad plan and the writers should be brought up on drug charges.
Of course, I don't know when in recent history they started to consider treaties such as the International Court in effect just because a portion of the signers ratified it. I'm fairly certain that's pretty new to history because it wasn't long ago that most treaties were bilateral, or only included a handful of signers. Nevertheless, the US has avoided most of those recent treaties, including the International Court, so I don't think we have had to confront a treaty we signed being presumed to be in effect and including us even though we didn't ratify it, yet.
Still, the treaty is not International law. It is merely an agreement by the countries that ratify it. Countries break treaties. That's may not be good diplomacy, but in thousands of years of history, it was never considered an International law violation. Usually, in bilateral treaties, it simply meant that the treaty was no longer in effect for either country. In other words, a treaty is like a cease fire, and breaking it usually just meant that the cease fire was over or no longer necessary. The US broke a treaty with the former Soviet Union because times changed, and Russia is no longer our primary concern for missile defense.
Open Standards Portal
That this is the first step in re-creating the old guild system of the middle ages?
The net effect of all these laws and treaties is to eliminate the public domain and force all of us into a pay-per-listen kind of license?
All under the guise of "protecting the musician".
I wonder who is stupid enough to fall for it. I mean, besides congress.
Does anybody think anything created by any committee of the United Nations would actually have our best interests at heart?
(Mod me Troll is you must, but at least give some good example to back up your opinion.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What benifit does this give to the broadcasters?
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).
The source material will be lying safely in a safe, somewhere. The owner is not in any way required to give me access to it. This effectively stops my ability to access the public domain work through this route.
Of course, any other copies will now be covered with copyright! In the past I could grab _any_ copy of the work, and do with it whatever I like. Now I cannot get any of the second-tier copies, and the chances of the original source material being available are negligible.
Effectively, this creates an eternal copyright. All that is needed to maintain it is to carefully lock up the original source material.
It could be argued that I could tape whatever I wanted to have, wait 50 years, and _then_ use it. This is both extremely impractical and, in combination with technical restrictions on taping things, unfeasible as well.