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."
Touche.
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...
Our country is run by lawyers. No where is this more obvious than when seeing the lawmaking process. Greased palms, closed door deals.
I have a solution, however. The problem is there are too many lawyers. They have no natural predator, as it were. I propose,then, a lawyer hunting season. Say, from Sept to March. Trophies are based on bank account size.
Of course, mounting your kill is perfectly acceptable.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Copyleft content can only be distributed under it's copyleft license. If someone wants to change the license terms then the redistribution license is void and the copyright owner can seek civil remedies for infringement. With regard to copyleft content, these bills are stillborn!
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?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What if only Fox or CBS has the footage of a particular public event? Do we let the broadcaster eviscerate the ideas of fair use, prohibiting other networks from showing fragments so as to comment on the events, or criticise the original coverage? The proposed treaty text allows for fair use-like exceptions but does not require them. Once again, we harmonise upward property rights for powerful commercial entities, but leave to individual states the discretion whether and how to frame of the equally crucial public interest exceptions to those rights. Increased property rights for broadcasters are required. The public interest in education, access, and free speech is optional. (Among other things, most of the recent drafts would outlaw home recording of TV and radio unless a special exception was put into the law, state by state.)
... that will more than likely pass simply because of the big company backing ... of course it would be almost impossible to enforce at the individual level ... nobody has the resources to check such things as recording tv or radio programs on your home pc, tape deck, etc.
Well written article. This sounds like a poor idea
It is our policy to push our ideas on as many nations as possible.
It helps distract from the fact that the people of our country have no say of their own...
(end of post)
You see, the US and Micrisofts and Hollywoods "vision" of the future is that instead of providing goods and services to pay off the huge US debts, they provide IP. While it's an interesting trade off: phoney property for printed up paper money, the problem is that for people to live day to day they need real goods and services. The problem is also that the information age implies just the opposite, information is becomming commoditized which means that it's service value is becoming worth more than it's IP value. Not to mention, that the information age is also making it impossible for the Fed to lie to people about the value of their money. Mees thinks all hell is about to break loose when the real world kicks in and ripps these people a new one.
...Piratbyrån's opinion will be taken into account.
The theory is that both copyright and treaty-making are in the constitution. The RIAA and the MPAA are whispering in the ears of congress, "If you pass a law giving us new rights, it can be constitutionally challenged and we lose, but if you make it part of a treaty, then we can contend that overturning the new treaty is just as unconstitutional as granting us a new right. We can contend that the Supreme Court does not have the power to overturn a treaty."
Ka-ching!
I don't want to be too off-topic or political here, so if I am, I apologize, but I have a few honest & serious questions.
Most people I know agree that copyright is messed up, and this proposal just makes the situation even more complicated.
From TFA: "rights have to be of limited duration". So, why is it that as a nation, we have not had any noticeable impact on the situation in our country? Do we really want to have copyright limited to a fixed duration again? Do we really want to have more freedom in obtaining, sharing, distributing content and ideas? Then why isn't that happening on a larger scale?
Things such as the GPL, Creative Commons type of licensing, etc. seem like a step in the right direction, but clearly even they have limitations. Why can't the public seem to get amendments that seem to work more in its favor (instead of in the favor of organizations, companies, etc.) on the table and then signed into law? Reasons other than capitalism, I mean...
SixD
Since Boyle first wrote about this last September, I was wondering what others had to say about it. Here's a blog entry from Lawrence Lessig. Not too much written there, but it led me to an EFF page and CPTech action page.
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.
Since the Constitution is the law of the land and no law is higher, any laws derived from a treaty that run counter to the Constitution are null and void.
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
Are you kidding me?! Take some free content and repackage it and suddenly it gets a copyright? There's GOT to be a way I can use this... I've got it!
I'm going to repackage "The King James Version" and other versions of "The Bible" and then sue every church that attempts to teach from it.
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
> Since the Constitution is the law of the land...
You misspelled "greed".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Well
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 . . .)
Yes, the US is pushing for this new IP concept, but it's through WIPO, so it's not intended solely for the US.
Of course they are doing it this way. WIPO isn't accountable to the USA people in the same way the USA government is supposed to be, so it's a lot easier to ram it through WIPO so that it's legally binding for the USA than to make things happen in the USA first.
This is just a way of circumventing democracy.
It seems that whoever is first to broadcast a copyrighted work is granted a right, independently of the copyright holder, to enjoin redistribution of that work. In other words, the broadcaster gets right of first refusal for any material they were ever first to broadcast.
It's not at all clear why they got this right in the first place (incentive to broadcast material they didn't produce themselves?), but today it's largely seen as highly anachronistic, and often described in derisive terms.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Dear US Government,
Get stuffed.
Yours sincerely,
The Rest of the World.
I have no problem with the US introducing stupid laws in their own country. But why on earth does this need to be pushed into the WIPO? Surely there are more important things to be worrying about than yet more rules to line the pockets of big business?
The most interesting part about the history of U.S. treaty law happened in the 1950s, and was called the Bricker Amendment. Before you go click on that link, let me give you the bad news first: it didn't pass. It came rather close, but it didn't make 2/3rds majority. If it had, we wouldn't be having this discussion now, because Bricker would have limited treaty powers in such a way that they couldn't be used to override established Constitutional rights, including ones held by the States under the 10th Amendment.
In retrospect, the Old Right bloc may have gotten a few things right after all; unfortunately not quite enough people saw it that way at the time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With the DMCA and the broadcast flag it will be illegal to save a copy. So even after the broadcast rights expires in 50 years, copies will still be unavailable thus making copyrights perpetual constitutional or not. Just broadcast again in 49 years to get another renewal. If someone proves it's identical they must have violated the DMCA.
Granted, I have not done an in-depth study of the constitution either, that was just how I was taught about it in school.
Of course, just because something isn't constitution doesn't mean it won't happen anyways....over my dead body!
If I wrote, performed and recorded the material, then *I alone* (or in partnership with other musicians who contributed to these works) get to decide how the material is to be licensed. If I release something under a creative commons license (as I have), then it is free (as in "speech") for others to use, *PERIOD*.
While I might be willing to sign over rights to my creative works to a publisher so that my works can be distributed, there's no way I would be willing to sign a contract that assigns the rights to my creative works to the broadcaster.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
...insofar as broadcasts deserve protection -- that is, to the extent that they include original creative work, even if they are derivative works -- they creator of the broadcast already is protected by copyright; as is the original underlying work. There is no use for "broadcast property" except to protect broadcasts that are of material that is not subject to copyright in the first place -- which is very little (since just putting together a broadcast usually creates an original work of authorship), except material already in the public domain.
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 actually am a constitutional scholar. I won't comment on whether the treaty is necessary or a good idea (actually I will: leges sine moribus vanae), but the "Supremacy Clause" of Article VI, Section 1, Clause 2 included treaties as part of the "supreme law of the land," with the understanding that they just can't conflict with the Constitution. And this propspective treaty wouldn't- Congress has authority to create copyright and patent legislation under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
Now granted, the Article I power belongs to Congress, and treaties are made by the President and only one house of the Congress, but the President's ability to make treaties (and thus the federal government's ability to make treaties, because only the executive branch has the power to make the agreement in the first place) would be meaningless if there wasn't some overlap with the broader legislative domain of the Congress. Think about it- the US is already a party to scads of treaties in the commerce and economic areas (which are traditionally in Congress' domain). Including treaties governing copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc.
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
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?
Treaties are legislation. The treaty acquires the force of law when ratified by Congress. No treaty trumps the Constitution.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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."
Read up on Reid v. Covert, a very important precident (probably more and more as we go forward) that says that all international treaties must respect the laws of the Constitution, preventing Congress from authorizing actions that it otherwise could not.
"I actually am a constitutional scholar."....."I must've been a horrible person in my last life, 'cause I came back as a guy on the help desk."
I think it's tremendous your country is willing to fund a help desk to resolve Constitutional dilemmas. That degree of faith in civic duty is becoming increasingly rare. =D