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WIPO Creating New IP Rights Over Web Content
An anonymous reader writes "The WIPO is currently engaged in negotiating a new treaty on digital IP rights, but they're having trouble agreeing on the particulars. Though the world of YouTube and podcasts seems like a place that 'requires' laws, the WIPO seems confused about what to do about it. From the article: 'The proliferation of low cost video cameras and editing software, higher bandwidth cable, satellite and Internet connections, are creating a highly diverse and dynamic environment for creating, distributing, redistributing and remixing information. To this exciting world the UN's specialized agency for intellectual property wants to impose a new legal regime. The problem is, no one here has a clue what the legal regime should look like.' The U.S. is also pushing for reviving a 1962 treaty (never ratified) that would give the large cable distributors (like Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc) ownership of even public domain content if they carry it. This would be in addition to any rights normally afforded the distributors. "
The only IP right that is real would be the right to copy. The right to copy and use ideas, information, and invention that comes our way freely without fraud or coercion. This right is just like the right to free religion, the right to free speech, or the right to choose our employers rather than to be slaves.
There are also dutys, like the duty to call copyrights and patents what they are: a fraud, a lie, and not a property right. Like the duty to call "piracy" what it is: the boarding of a ship and murdering people and not copying. Like the duty to call them controls rather than incentive or protection. Like the duty to bypass and defy people who try to control our liberties via controlling the information we have or via telling us how we must use it.
Finally, there are other things that are just human nature, like sharing music and information and ideas freely with the world around us.
Lets just face it, the WIPO are WhImPO's and are against free markets and property rights, not for them.
I have a problem with the concept of a "regime"...
Owning public domain content because you show it is like owning some air because you once exhaled it.
Better start paying Cesar royalties.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Uhm, no, regular copyright laws cover it quite well. Specialized laws are not required. Particularly, the US effort to revive a dead treaty which would allow big corporate entities to rope off bits of the public domain simply becaue they used it is not necessary (and, anyway, something the US could not Constitutionally adhere to since it exceeds, quite clearly, the Constitutional power of the US government as regards IP, since it would extend IP rights to someone who is not the creator of work, and that do not arise because of a relationship with the creator.)
Does this mean the material is no longer public domain?
I can't imagine that would work... since anyone could go back to the original source material and use that.
Or is this just an attempt to put public proceedings (Senate/Congress sessions for example) into private hands?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Is Intellectual Property a Crime?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If YouTube, et al have done anything, it's show that a different business model can work: the value is not in production of the material, it's in delivering it.
Previously, if I had wanted lame videos of punk skateboarders doing tricks, angsty teenagers venting their mixed-up feelings, middle-age housewives boody-popping, etc. I would have had to spend countless hours trolling the murky depths and dark recesses of the Internet to find them. Thanks to YouTube, I have a single, convenient place to satisfy my disgusting and perverse needs.
Seriously though, can we please stop trying to create artificial scarcity? We don't really need it; TV shows, movies, and music worth paying for are already scarce enough.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
while almost everyone thinks its just fine for me to loan a friend a rented DVD before I return it, there are those that think if I share a video on the Internet it should be regulated, taxed, or scrutinized against IP and copyright laws.
.. well, they are fscked. No, I don't have a ready example of how to fix them all. I do know that simply wanting to fix things will not do so. Any regulations placed on Internet based services will not work if they fail to pass the 'basic human morals' test.
The Internet has changed the world in many significant ways, but it has not changed basic human morals, and won't. I see nothing wrong with sharing things with others, and any regulatory body that wants to change that will find me looking for, and finding, other ways to do so.
Copyright and IP law as they currently are implemented
Lets say someone in highschool in Chicago makes some wacky video on their pc, and shares it with friends via CD. There is no way to police this sort of content production.
Now, lets say that they share it with several million of their friends via news groups? Still, not much hope of policing this. Okay, so our content creator now shares it with several million of their friends via YouTube. Suddenly, because of the visibility of the WWW, people think that it should be regulated, scrutinized, and by god, lets punish those evil copyright infringers.
Human behavior has not changed. The thing that changed is that now more people can more quickly see what others are doing. This doesn't mean that there is more infringement necessarily, only that more people can see what they think is infringement.
Regulating the viewing mechanism for that content will not stop its production. Result: This is a broken way to try to fix what was not a problem in the first place.
Additionally, by putting the burden on YouTube, MySpace and others, they are creating a sort of conscripted volunteer police force, which in the end will also fail.
The only way to fix these infringements is to make them legally not infringements. For many of the same reasons that we should not be fighting a war on drugs http://www.leap.org/, we shouldn't be fighting a war on copyright infringement. Those who fight copyright infringements (**AAs) are simply building sandcastles on the beach at low tide.
The UN, or any other body does not have enforcement authority, nor will they, UNLESS they decide to change / repeal the overreaching copyright laws that have to date been enacted.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ill-advised remakes of things that weren't much good in the first place.. you can just smell Hollywood's influence.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Why is the United States wasting what little good will it has around the world with intellectual property rights issues? Why is the destruction of public domain a top priority? I would think that a potentially nuclear Iran, the Iraq war and global terrorism would take up the time of the diplomats. Are government officials being bought off with cash or sexual favors from aspiring actresses? If the air conditioning/ home heating industry lobbied for international regulations that every building in the world would have to be maintained at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, it would be crazy. I guess public domain now means "Ready to be taken into the possession of a large corporation".
My guess is that government regulators don't understand what's going on. They receive their money/blowjobs from the content industry and do as they are told.
Are people threatening bodily harm? If not, then I can not see a "requirement" for laws at all.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
UN's specialized agency for intellectual property wants to impose a new legal regime
I, for one, like living in a society ruled by laws rather than the whims of men. If by 'legal regime' the author means a legal structure in which to resolve disputes, I am all for it. After all, disputes will happen and the law should provide a means to deal with them in a civilized and fair manner. By referring to an attempt to codify our values as a regime we indicate that we are no longer willing to participate in this discourse and abdicate any power we might have to influence the outcome in a way beneficial to us. We shouldn't focus on the fact that there will be laws that may limit what we can do when interacting with other people, but should remember that laws have their uses and abuses and we should try to participate in the process. If we don't I guarantee to you that someone will and that their interests will be considered with a weight proportional to the energy and money they invested in the process. As individuals and groups without great political and economic resources we shouldn't turn out backs on the very idea of law, it's all we have.
How about if it's on the net, it's public domain? Then make it a matter of paying for stuff to be put on the net.
If these companies can't figure out a way to protect their 'intellectual property', then tough titty for them!
They can stop making the product. If there is enough demand for the product, someone else will step up.
Let the invisible hand take care of this.
Of course, since the USA doesn't actually create anything of value to the rest of the world....save food and media...it's understandable why the government wants to protect the economy.
Blar.
The corporations won't be satisfied until they are getting a premium from everything we say or read or watch or hear.
Nobody wants to buy our cars, we don't produce many other manufactured goods. Our software and our media is what the world is willing to pay for. The government understands perfectly, beause the government let jobs flow out of the nation.
Blar.
The Internet without content management laws is like a fish without a bicycle.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
...when there are already plenty laws, and no chance in hell to enforce them. There's something like 60 million people in the US (200 million worldwide) that's been using file sharing. At that point it gets sort of like prohibition - it's easy to show alcohol is linked to violence, crime, drunk driving, alcoholism and poor health effects. Yet so many want to do it, it's so easy to produce that what you'd have to go through to stop it, would be much worse if at all possible.
People today are able to send incredible amounts of information to each other through ad hoc networks of various kinds, the only way to make any serious impact on that would be to create some sort of totalitarian central sharing system staffed with vast amounts of mpaa/riaa goons and real penalties for end users. Anything else... well, it looks good on paper but what would you do? Throw 60mio people in jail? Even with the rabid sentences in the US, I think it's only about 3%.. 20% would be beyond insane.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let me encapsulate the thoughts of millions:
FUCK OFF
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Did the author even read the article, or is his knee twitching after a cursory skim-over?
Anonymous Reader said: The U.S. is also pushing for reviving a 1962 treaty (never ratified) that would give the large cable distributors (like Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc) ownership of even public domain content if they carry it.
The actual article said: One faction in the negotiations wants to revamp provisions in a 1961 treaty (one that the United States and 80 other countries never signed), with new or expanded intellectual property rights for anyone who "broadcasts" third party content.
Yes giving ownership of public domain content would be insane, but from the article I don't see the U.S.A. proposing that (and apparently they didn't like it in 1961 either).
According to http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/2007-Janu ary/001971.html
(linked from the article), the U.S.A. is apaprently in favor of the
narrower signal-based treaty that does NOT give exclusive rights to
broadcasters.
IANAL, but as I understand it, the creator / author / composer / artist automatically has ownership of the created work - except in the case of "works for hire", which are owned by the person / entity who commissioned the work.
As for the old, non-ratified treaty, it just sounds wrong. It seems to require that content creators surrender ownership to the distributors, rather than licensing distribution rights, as is currently done. This just seems to be a way for big media to reassert their strangle hold on the flow of content.
As for what WIPO is trying to do, while I'm sure they would like us to believe that they are trying to protect the rights of content creators who post their works from "accidentally" giving away their work, more likely, they are subscribing to the assumption that, until proven otherwise, the posters do not actually own the content they post. (And if that old treaty gets successfully revived, they won't, even if they did own it before they posted it.)
Part of me would like to think that the politicians would smell the stink in this before now, but since they effectively work for big media (and big business in general), anyway, they see no reason to care that their own content would become the poperty of said big media.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
It means that if a television station aired a public domain film, then the television station would hold all the rights to re-air that content for 50 years.
Theoretically, a Creative Commons-licensed podcast could be broadcast by a cable station, and then the creator would lose rights to rebroadcast the material on their own!
More info via the EFF.
Now, it is generally agreed that distribution of information is generally desirable. Copyright is based on a view that giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable. You may disagree with these, but that's somethign of a radical viewpoint. I'm going from what is pretty much prevailing wisdom. Not much has changed in copyright media for the past 50 years. There are more media types available, but the entire production and distribution of a DVD or a piece of software is not fundamentally different from the production and distribution of a novel or a vinyl record. Likewise, a satellite transmission, is not fundamentally different from a longwave audio broadcast.
What has changed more recently is ease of copying. But video and audio data have been easily copyable for decades. Copyright law has presumably dealt with this adequately. We still have a large industry based on copyrighted works so we canpresume that this has been dealt with adequately.
So the only substantial change has been that it's now a lot easier to distribute information, and a lot easier to store it
I can send a movie file to hundreds of people with easily purchased consumer equipment. By my earlier arguments this is a good thing - "distribution of information is generally desirable". It's also a bad thing "giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable".
So what the law needs to do is find a balance. The law is already taking into account the control aspect. Everything that is likely to need to be protected already is. But there are a lot of restrictions on distribution and archiving. One might argue too many. Countless works have been lost because preserving a copy has been seen as not financially viable for the owners and illegal for others. Copyright holders are hoarding information that is no longer seen as saleable, and could be shared freely at no loss to anyone. Society would become richer as a result. The law needs to be changed to account for this. Screw your right to share Pirates of the Caribbean on bittorrent. That's not important. What is important is making more information available to the world.
I thought that GW Bush had declared the UN irrelevant :P
The disconnect between the UN and reality seems wider every day.
Really, laws regulations and initiatives like this (and this and this and this) make it increasingly necessary for the Powers that Be(tm) to think about criminalizing online anonymity altogether, lest the bureaucracy be powerless to enforce their will.
And with so few people who even know they should care about this, who's to stop it? Unless Tor and I2P get encapsulated within programs that millions of people use (à la Torpark), well... if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it...
Pi Ran Out
I just came to read slashdot after watching Sherlock Holmes. And I don't know if it was the influence of the movie or this topic, but I read all the comments in british accent while imagining old brits with beards arguing on copyright. It's like I'm back in the past and there are still copyright laws! Oh, wait...
Yes, yes .. Sometimes I sit down and think of the inherent unfairness in the system, and it makes my blood boil.
I would just love to put a fucking bullet in GW Bush's skull, and the rest of his cronies. I hope that one day I get the opportunity.
What a great way to keep The People out of the process. Also a great way for politicians to deny responsibility. When I become Overlord, expect many more treaties.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
La propriété, c'est le vol! (Property is theft).
Whenever I see "WIPO", I immediately think of Taco Snotting. Thanks, WIPO Troll!
what would you do? Throw 60mio people in jail?
Of course you don't through 60 million people in jail. Increasing the legal penalties (and broadening defitions) for common activity just allows them to more easily nab the people that they do want to nail. If you've got 60 million people who are now regularly committing a "crime," it's much easier to nail the ones you want for some reason or other.
some video I post on Youtube and carries it on thier site I lose my rights to it?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I know the police are useless to prevent against robbery, I've been robbed and the cops pretty much told me that I had to handle it myself because they can't be everywhere.
My main system is a dual-processor Athlon MP system. A few minutes googling couldn't turn up a manufacturing country.
Maybe they should let the citizens of the nation in which the corporation is based have free-access...but limit it for the rest of the world.
Blar.
'Cause I think that the ultra-strict DRM would drive consumers away...and consumers would figure out a way to get that content anyway.
You don't need BitTorrent to get DVDs of movies still in the theater...I go to the 'swap meet' in New Haven on Ella T. Grasso Blvd durring the summer and buy all sorts of movies for like $5 each!
Blar.
Er, no, they aren't.
"The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution." Reid v. Covert, 354 US 1 (1957) at 5-6.
"It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights - let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition - to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.
There is nothing new or unique about what we say here. This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.
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This Court has also repeatedly taken the position that an Act of Congress, which must comply with the Constitution, is on a full parity with a treaty, and that when a statute which is subsequent in time is inconsistent with a treaty, the statute to the extent of conflict renders the treaty null. It would be completely anomalous to say that a treaty need not comply with the Constitution when such an agreement can be overridden by a statute that must conform to that instrument. " id, at 17.
Yep, cant have that pesky free content floating around legally, as it might eat into our obscene profits.
What a farce.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If only the railroads had invented this same concept back in the 1800s. Imagine how much better off everyone would be today!
Was he modded down because he really was flaming, or because you mods didn't agree with his ideas?
If you disagree, don't hit moderate, hit reply.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
The U.S. is also pushing for reviving a 1962 treaty (never ratified) that would give the large cable distributors (like Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc) ownership of even public domain content if they carry it.
Awesome. All the bitorrent movie content that is carried on my own harddrives and over my own ethernet switches will then be owned by me. Surely this is what this law means? The government wouldnt grant large corporations the right to pillage and steal valuable IP ( which far more heinous than terrorism, murder, molestation, mocking the president, and other capital crimes ) without affording that same priviledge to the common man, surely?
For every bit of Public Domain work that has its ownership stolen from me ( as Public Domain content is jointly owned by me and others ), I reserve the right to sieze the non-public domain work of others. Fair is fair.
When I play the DVD I bought in front of friends, haven't I done the exact same thing ('cept I haven't asked them to pay: maybe I should)? So shouldn't I also get copyright to that version?
Cool.
You described the world WITHOUT BANS on creativity as world with BANNED creativity and it is very far from the truth!
Choices of what to *Consume*... indeed! The way you want it we have no choice of making it ourself or sharing with others, because inevitably, if all of us create, some of our creations will be too similar to Some Guy's(TM). In some cases, when there is One True Way (c) to do something, who ever spits first, can extort other, later comers
Wrong thing about this (your) school of thought are two assumptions (visible in your post as well):
1) that interest of thinkers and creators are above interest of general public, or more to the point, that it transgresses the area of their consistent mutual interest and
2) that there is enormous scarcity of thinkers and creators in the world.
While it is very flattering to those who are career intellectuals, it is actually a useful lie for information brokers because it pits their "cows" against the general public who is full of... money! However since scarcity is not there (even without considering digital lossless copying of information), scarcity can be artificially achieved by installing laws that put every weak competition in creativity field at liability risk, thus turning them into
Also, consequence of 1) and 2) is that there is no provision for the fact that there is no natural line of separation between general public and "Th & Cr" and this artificial wall that is being built is hurting people. The fact is that of recent legislation is turning tables completely against the majority while at the same time protection for small group of thinkers and creators is expanded so much that it is choking and stifling the process of widening pool of casual creators and thinkers, and that actually makes us all more bored and poorer, locked in, with our hands tied. At the same time, insulting, snobbish IP propaganda is trying to discourage us from even trying to be creative and is glorifying superhuman "heros" (suits' cattle, no better... you can see that "golden" grin on managers' faces) of (boxing match announcers' voice:) "Creation And Authoring".
First of all, CD's are not manufactured in Warcraft or Age of Empires. Second, the reason for purchasing the CD is moot. First prerequisite to purchase anything is of course existence of that thing combined with lack of possession over it.
Selling as little as necessary to as much as possible - that is what IP is all about.
From what I can tell of almost everything the WIPO has done to date, it's a classic case of an organisation simply doing stuff because it has a remit to do it, rather than out of any need to do it or even an understating of why it should. This latest move is typical. Internet + content + intellectual property = something WIPO should gwt involved with. But why? Might it be better simply to stand aside and do nothing? We'll never know, because the boys and girls at WIPO are paid to do a job - and by gum they'll do it. Regardless.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
...has already blessed us in countless ways. After all, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was when corporations were unassailably entrenched as legal persons within the legal framework of the United States (and other countries which it would later dominate). Without corporate legal personhood, the RIAA and all the other mafIAA, not to mention your friendly local transnational megacorp, wouldn't be in the position of absolute power and unwarranted power over mere natural persons which they enjoy today. So, every time you feel oppressed by some corporate-fascist diktat, give thanks to the railroads, to the Best Government Corporate Money Can Buy, and to the megacorps without whom only freedom would be possible.