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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
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