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!"

Comments

Re:That else are the gonna do?

[Xaleth Nuada]

One common fallacy that keeps coming up in all these debates with regards to the 2000 election is the word democracy. This is the one word that everyone keeps saying and yet doesn't apply. Why?

Because The United Stated of America is a REPUBLIC. Yes the citizens are given the right to vote. But unlike a true (read: classical) democracy we do not vote on the specific issues, except in state or local elections. We vote in represenatives to do our voting for us. In ancient Greece (Athens) every voting citizen would gather together and vote on the issues that the government was dealing with (taxes, war, trade, etc.) One citizen, one vote. Or as we like to call it: The Popular Vote. (Popular being Populus or Population)

We don't do that in the US. Our Presidental elections were set up from the beginning with an electoral college. We vote to tell other people how to vote. This is the foundation of a Republic (see the combo of the word represent and public?) Etymology and History are neat huh?