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Boyle on Webcasters and WIPO
pjones writes "It's always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, "More rights are wrong for webcasters." Boyle lays it out so that "economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money" can get what's wrong."
Then be more amazed:
How open source gave power to the people
By Richard Waters, September 19 2005
The sedentary art of software development and the extreme sports of kitesurfing, sailplaning and canyoning would appear to have little in common.
However, both are examples of a new force that could eventually affect a far broader range of companies and industries: the power of users to shape how products are developed.
More...
Currently there's an interview with Matthew Szulik of Red Hat, who says he was first inspired by the potential of open source by work undertaken by Richard Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Also there's a commentary by Lawrence Lessig headlined "The march of the web-enabled amateurs" about "grand collaborative projects carried out by volunteers made possible by wikis."
See Financial Times Digital Business
James Boyle: More rights are wrong for webcasters
>By James Boyle
>Published: September 26 2005 18:58 | Last updated: September 26 2005 18:58
>>
I teach intellectual property law, a subject that is attracting attention from economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money. These, after all, are the rules that define the hightechnology marketplace. Are we doing a good job of writing those rules? The answer is no. Three tendencies stand out.
First and most lamentably, intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary or that they will help rather than hurt. Second, the policymaking process has failed to keep track of the increasing importance of intellectual property rights to everything from freedom of expression and communications policy to economic development or access to educational materials. We still make law as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups - balancing the interests of content companies with those of broadcasters, for example. The public interest in competition, access, free speech and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat. What matters is making the big boys happy. Finally, communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules, as law regulates technology more and more directly; not always to good effect.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation has now managed to combine all three lamentable tendencies at once. The Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty, currently being debated in Geneva, is an IP hat trick.
Much of what is broadcast over the airwaves is copyrighted - the broadcaster licenses the film or song from a copyright holder and then plays it to you at home. What you probably do not know is that nearly 50 years ago broadcasters in some countries got an additional right, layered on top of the copyright. Even if the material being broadcast was in the public domain, or the copyright holder had no objection to redistribution, the broadcaster was given a legal right to prevent it - a 20-year period of exclusivity. The ostensible reason was to encourage broadcasters to invest in new networks. The US did not sign this treaty. Has the US broadcast industry stagnated, crippled by the possibility that their signals will be pirated? Hardly. Copyright works well and no additional right has proved necessary. Has WIPO commissioned empirical studies to see if the right was necessary, comparing those nations that adopted it with those that did not? Of course not. This is intellectual property policy: we do not need facts. We can create monopolies on faith.
But now a new diplomatic conference is being convened to reopen the issue. Doubtless the goal is to abolish this right? There was never any empirical evidence behind it. Broadcasters in countries that did not adopt it have flourished, albeit casting envious eyes to the legal monopolies possessed by their counterparts in more credulous nations whose politicians are more deeply in the pockets of broadcasting interests. The right imposes considerable costs. It adds yet another layer of clearances that must be gained before material can be digitised or redistributed - compounding the existing problems of "orphan works", those whose owners cannot be identified. So is the broadcast right on the way out? No.
In the funhouse world that is intellectual property policy, WIPO is considering a proposal to expand the length of the right by 30 years and a US-backed initiative to apply it to webcasts as well. After all, we know that the internet is growing so slowly. Clearly what is needed is an entirely new legal monopoly, on top of copyright, so that there are even more middlemen, even deeper thickets of rights.
What is the rationale for this proposal? Parity: "If the broadcasters have the right, we should too." But wait. There was never any evidence that even broadcasters needed the right. And the capital requirements and business models of the two industries are entirely dif
That's a famous quote from Willie Sutton, in the 1930's (USA). FYI, it's the *classic* example of for why lawyers are told to *never* put their defendant on the stand in a trial (because it was a stupid admission of guilt after the prosecutor lulled the defendant into confident and cocky behavior on the stand). On Willie's life: http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/sutton /sutton.htm>
Poor analogy. Try: if the ISPs start charging $2 per email sent, then it would be in the public interest for our Post Office to start offering a free or very cheap email service.
If the drug companies insist on making 700% profit on drugs that they develop, then our government should step-in and conduct/finance "open source" drug development. And before anyone says that the drug companies need to charge high prices to fund further research, an NPR report talked about one of the large drug companies (Merck? Pfizer?) spending in one year (2003?) $7B on research, and making a net profit of $48B.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
http://www.prisonsoup.com/
http://www.dance-industries.com/home.php
That should give you some leads.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The article doesn't discuss just "more rights" for just any "webcaster". It specifically talks about how a "US-backed initiative" is designed to turn a 30-year "exclusive right to broadcast certain content" that some broadcasters in some (non-US) countries enjoy into an 80-year worldwide right for all webcasters. That broadcaster would, apparently, mean that webcasting a song or show would entitle a single webcaster to own it for a (long) lifetime - presumably when the time will be extended. That content includes even public domain content, stealing it from the public for a single webcaster. It's insane, and it seems like it will become the global content monopoly law.
Webcasters do need more rights, just not at the very top like that insane monopoly law. At the bottom, webcasters must pay a minimum $500:year to stream copyrighted content. Per-play rates are $0.0007:listen for songs. That's $90:year for a 24/7/365 listener, so webcasters would have to stream continuously to at least 6, or more like 20-50 listeners just to afford the "blanket" rates.
Nevermind that the per-play rates are created by dividing the total purchase price of Broadcast.com by Yahoo by the number of songs in Broadcast.com's library, so per-play rates are equal to the price Yahoo paid for unlimited plays. Or that the sale was in Yahoo stock at their most hyperinflated bubble price, and the value of the rest of Broadcast.com in addition to the songs, all counted as value of the songs. Those rates are about 100x any fair price, if a fair rate could even be derived from such a transaction in unrelated terms. And again, it's $500 just to get in the game.
Then there's the "song frequency" rules which prohibit "heavy rotation" of songs, or even artists, much more strictly than on radio transmission. Or the absolute prohibition on "interactive" (requests) services. These rules are all designed to cripple the hobbyist or personal-scale webcaster, even nonprofits (like small/public colleges), and anyone producing "Internet radio" any different than the stale preprogrammed formats driving people away from radio in droves.
Webcasters have rights. These rules take them away. That repression creates rebellion. In the meantime, it creates profits for the global masters like Viacom, ClearChannel, NewsCorp, Disney. Welcome to our mickey mouse New World Order.
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make install -not war
Broadcasters are not the authors of a public domain work that they broadcast. If this section doesn't apply, then the First Amendment reigns supreme.
-- and if the author of a work doesn't mind it's retransmission, then there is no way that this section allows someone else to prevent the retransmission of his work, as that infringes the artist's right of free speech, and their exclusive right to their work.
(IANAL)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Ahhh. I see you've never even read an NSF grant proposal, let alone ever written one. Do you really think you can just blow smoke up the NSF's asses and wait for the government money to roll in?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.