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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. "
Your assertion that you have some "right" to do whatever you want with someone else's ideas, information, or invention is just that - an assertion. It does not flow from any first principle. In other words, what moral or rational basis do you use to argue that if a company spends e.g. $1 billion dollars developing a cure for some disease that you have the "right" to just steal their formula and start cranking out cheap copies?
Sometimes the pendulum does swing too far the other way, e.g. government force used to protect inane technical copyright protection. However, the idea of some sorts (not what we have today, mind you - I'll agree there) of IP and copyright protection make sense and have a rational and moral component whether you dirty fucking hippies like it or not.
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.