Slashdot Mirror
New IP Treaty Looming?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article by James Boyle in the Financial Times, the United States is helping push a Treaty that would create an entirely new type of intellectual property right in the US, in addition to copyright, covering anything that is broadcast or webcast. (Regardless of whether the work was in the public domain, Creative Commons Licensed etc, the broadcaster would control any copies made from the broadcast for 50 years.) Boyle argues that this is dumb, unconstitutional, and anyway should be debated domestically first."
"Having debates on U.S. Policy is sooo pre-2001. Try again in January 2009..."
I disagree, debate is common. Its a good handwaving, misdirecting, tactic.
Now, if you said 'logic' and 'reason' then I'd agree with you.
I don't get it.
anything that is broadcast or webcast
:o)
Er... What if I speak about it ? Will I be covered. ? I mean could I sue anyone repeating what I said ?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The guy who owns the server, the guy who paid for an account on the server, or the ISP the server colos at or is connected to?
The one with the most money to spend on lawyers.
In related news, FedEx & UPS join forces to get the FedUPS Act of 2006 passed that would give transportation companies intellectual claim to every copyrighted material they transport.
Seriously, why should FedEx or UPS lay claim on a book they transport? Why is a (TV) broadcaster any more special because they transmit a signal? Cuz they put there little logo in the bottom right? Or because they do all kinds of fancy pop-outs that advertise other shows?
Neither FedEx nor a broadcaster do anything original, why do they get protection from Big Brother?
:wq
Maybe this is the **AA solution to the massive failure of the current stategy?
With regard to FOSS/GPL/CC offerings, will this make the proprietors of the infrastructure (telcos) owners of the information being transmitted, trumping the rights of the original copyright holders?
# ~: no sigs today
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Gah you can't make something that is public domain and make it not public domain in terms of distribution.
My head asploded.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Pirate steals stream, hosts it over P2P (and if it's on there, he doesn't care about intellectual property), millions of other people host it and suddenly everyone's an Intellectual Property holder! How can this be a bad thing? (Yeah, sort of naïve to beleive that, but it's worth a shot . . .)
I think that may be the way it works in Europe, but in the United States, the Constitution states:
So if I read this properly, treaties made are placed on the same level as the Constitution. Bit of a loophole.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I propose a constitutional amendment specifying a max # of words for all legislation that is valid at any given period of time (kind of like the max # of words limits in a homework assignment). After applying a new piece of legislation, if the total # of words doesn't fit under the limit, then the new piece of legislation is rejected.
If the # is small enough, it should 1) give the legislators some reason to use more precise wording, 2) they'll only be able to cover the "basics" of running a society, 3) it will be a lot simpler for normal people to search & understand the legal code, and the 4) legislators will be forced to decide how they want to affect existing law every time they propose a new one.
You'll have to include agency regulations under the total word limit, however, otherwise the legislators will just push all the excess verbiage down into the agency rulebooks.
(This is somewhat a joke, but now that I've thought about it, as a solution it has some attractive qualities...)
I have no idea how you could have a genuinely open, fair, multi-party system. It would presumably need to borrow some ideas from proportional representation, as that seems to be the only method of reliably getting multiple parties into politics. Italy, however, shows the risks of the opposite extreme - having too many parties. There, the former Prime Minister is actively working to bring down the current Government in an effort to pull off a coup and seize power. There very nearly wasn't a current Government, as he'd refused to step down even after losing the election.
My best guess at this time would be for the top two or three candidates to represent the constituancy in direct proportion to the percent of vote they received. So, a person getting 50% of the vote would have 50% of the voting block. This avoids the whole problem of what to do in a tie, as you'd simply have more than one person with the same voting strength.
I also think that the system needs a third, unelected house, where members are selected from the jury pool and who can place bills on trial, as per any other trial. The idea would be to have a group of anonymous people that lobbyists could not identify to corrupt, and who would retain any influence for such a short time that power itself could not corrupt them.
What I do not know is how you could implement either of these ideas within the framework of the US Constitution, or how they could be adapted to fit within the expectations of having a clear line of responsibility, or how they could be debugged on the basis of how political systems actually work in practice.
I guess that information, if anyone did have it, would be covered by this new IP treaty and could not, therefore, be divulged except at a great price.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think I've managed to find a draft copy of the treaty proposal (the article was rather light on information in that regard):
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/
I decided to quickly grep through the document for copyright, and I came cross this:
Article 1
Relation to Other Conventions and Treaties
(1) Nothing in this Treaty shall derogate from existing obligations that Contracting Parties
have to each other under any international, regional or bilateral treaties addressing copyright
or related rights.
(2) Protection granted under this Treaty shall leave intact and shall in no way affect the
protection of copyright or related rights in program material incorporated in broadcasts.
Consequently, no provision of this Treaty may be interpreted as prejudicing such protection.
(3) This Treaty shall not have any connection with, nor shall it prejudice any rights and
obligations under, any other treaties.
Taking a leap of faith here, isn't Copyright embodied within the WCT and Berne Convention (I've only done a few moments' research on this, so I may have that wrong)?
Therefore, this new "Broadcast Orgnisation Protection Treaty" might not actually cause the creative-commons-but-wait-oh-shit nightmare scenario in TFA.
IANAL, of course, so perhaps the interaction between this and the Copyright treaty is more sinister than it seems above.
Thoughts?
I don't think so. Such an amendment would have been disastrous. It would make it impossible for the EPA to implement Kyoto (if we ever ratify the dang thing), impossible to outlaw torture (that's a non-chattel moral crime and, traditionally, the province of the several States), etc. Such an amendment would leave us with an inability to have a foreign policy that amounted to more than what we have right now -- "Do it our way, or we'll overextend our military resources trying to kick your ass."