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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."
WIPO has confused the issue, and Boyle does little to clear it up. The term "right" has been used in place of "entitlement" or "monopoly" to describe the expanded ability of a broadcaster to claim public domain works as their own for 20 years. This is not a right, this is a reduction in rights of everyone else. It is an entitlement, an entitlement to something that no one else will be allowed to have. It gives broadcasters a monopoly on works that they did not create. Boyle is correct in saying that this is bad policy. Anyone with eyes can see it as so.
But he also tackles the issue from a strange direction. He sees law and policy as a means to an end rather than the description and implementation of a general principle. Laws should reflect the general will of the people, in my opinion, rather than be used to reach a specific outcome. By requiring that laws need a specific goal (in this case to expand broadcast network infrastructure), we leave ourselves open to exactly the problem of industrial horse-trading that Boyle seeks to avoid. If Boyle really believes that these laws are wrong, why does he attack it on the effects it will have rather than on the general principle?
The problem is that by granting special "copyright" to public domain works to broadcasters, it effectively removes those works from the public domain. As a result, the freedom to access or otherwise use those works becomes infringed. This is not a matter of the new rules having no positive effect. It is a matter of reducing the amount of freedoms of everyone except a handful of quick-moving broadcasters. That is the principle at stake here, not some untestable hypothesis regarding the reduced likelihood of new networks being set up.
This is, as Boyle points out, a bad direction on the part of WIPO. It is unnecessary and harms the freedoms of almost all involved. However, fighting this encroachment of rights should not be waged on an effects basis because then we become the horse-traders that Boyle seems to despise. Instead it is necessary to confront this on the basis of first principles from which can be developed a sane and equitable intellectual property policy.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
It seems logical that the FT would be on the side of business - and of course, they are. Virtually their entire readership would agree that making money is a good thing.
However, taken as a whole, entrenched monopolies and cartels are not good for business. Small businesses and startups are essential for the economy, especially in fast growing sectors. Economists know this. As such, it's not all that surprising that the FT will take a stance that is against that of the multinationals.
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...
The war on drugs did accomplish something for nixon and his party.
The drug bills he rammed through congress circumvent the constitution by giving congressional/legislative authority to unaccountable fda staff.
Thanks to this law a cabal of fda hanchos are able to make any drug they please illegal to even research in direct violation of the constitution, which states affirmatively that congress and congress alone shall have the right to create permanent regulations.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Is it moral to let millions die in name of patents. They argue that if patents are not respected then there wont be money for new medical research, well thats crap, medical research should be funded, period.
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
Heck, I don't think there are enough monopolies, lets have more!
UPS should be able to own the packages it ships for an exclusive 50 year period.
Web-Email providers should be able to own my emails for 50 year period just because I read them over the Internet.
ISPs should be able to own everything sent over their networks for 50 years.
I should be able to setup an open WIFI hotspot and own rights over anything anyone sends through it, for 50 years.
What about supermarkets? They should be able to say how you use their produce, for example: "you shall only use this Walmart pasta sauce with official Walmart pasta".
We need more exclusive IP rights holders, because IP rights are the cause of Americas huge trade surplus.
So where's the money in this festering mess? Is it possibly in the tax base? Expanded IP expands the tax base at a loss to the public interest. IP marks a clear paper trail as to who owns what and what can be expected in terms of revenue and, in turn, tax revenue.
Big government requires big tax revenues and what better to "sell off" than the cultural and intellectual heritage of it's constituents. The infrastructure to oversee IP is minimal while the tax gain is substantial. Basically it's a big tax grab. Maybe it'll be pay raises all around for our elected representatives.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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
It's great that people are starting to see "intellectual property" is just another way for corporations and crooks to control people's data and behaviour once the product leaves the producer's hands. Most of the examples given could come true, and we'd have all the corporate shills telling us that Walmart's pasta sauce is "licensed" and not sold, or some such nonsense.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
> He sees law and policy as a means to an end rather than the description and implementation of a
> general principle
Well, approaching this issue in the same direction as those who pass the law is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if your goal is to deconstruct this view. You show how the policies created with this mindset fail. He seems to be doing this job fairly well. Even the constitution states that copyright law exists to further the sciences and arts thus being to achieve an objective and not to uphold principles. Perhaps the principle being upheld is that we as a society want to technologically advance thus our laws must reflect that.
He is merely stating that given the objectives, the law providing additional rights to broadcasters has failed. Stating that copyrights are wrong or extending copyrights is wrong shifts the framing of the debate to something the broadcast industry doesn't want to hear. They will be far more likely to listen to someone who says, I agree with your goals, but this isn't going to accomplish them. Often, its better to just deconstruct the views of an opponent in a debate than to repeatedly yell your view point.
but then, what do I know... my idea of debating an issue is slashdot...
When all else fails, try.
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>
Over 25% of Black men in America are "in the (penal) system". The drug laws have created hundreds of thousands of nonviolent felons, especially Black and Hispanic men. Those men cannot vote, and are impaired in competing with other people for jobs. That's one simple method for converting customs between consenting adults into a permanent underclass. Thanks, Dick!
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make install -not war
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.
No kidding. I think I understand it less after reading the article than I did previously and previously I was unaware of the issue.
Does this mean that (if this had been in force in the US) a TV station in New York could put on their own production of one of Shakespeare's works or Beethoven's symphonies, and then forbid any other station in the US from doing the same for 20 years? 'Cause that's what it sounds like, and I can't see how anyone could possibly come up with any kind of believable justification for it.
I welcome any clarification from anyone actually familiar with this particular provision of whatever that treaty was.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Because for every secretary that could be employed to type the words that I am writing, there could be another secretary that could be the secretary's secretary, typing up things like what I am writing for tse. Therefor production of any text which is not typed by a secretary typing for a secretary should be charged a "secretary's secretary tax", to support those poor secretaries of secretaries who lose money due to the single-secretary writing of text.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.