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Look Inside A PC-killing WIPO Treaty
mouthbeef writes "The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping 'signal theft.' But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror), trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!"
Idiot. The US constitution is just as vague: and if you look at most other international treaties you find it to be similar - such treaties always have to leave some leeway to accomodate the specific circumstances of national states.
The purpose of treaties is to get widescale buy in, yet not to make the details so inflexible that it causes members too much pain upon implementation.
(and I'm not saying the Broadcast Treaty is a good one, I'm trying to impart some education on the nature of treaties, and whether or not you like that they are done this way, the fact is that they largely are)