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WIPO Creating New IP Rights Over Web Content

Posted by Zonk on from the get-the-rights-right dept.

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. "

7 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Real information rights!!! by argoff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Real information rights!!! by Yartrebo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And people wonder why so many people are against globalization.

      The reason is not any hate of foreign countries or trade, but rather that it's a code word for giving more power and money to the ultra rich and powerful by restricting the freedoms and rights (including property rights) of the working class (which includes the middle class).

    2. Re:Real information rights!!! by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      Well, if you look at the world without the modern day legal blinders on, yes, you do have a basic natural right to do exactly that. The only thing taking that right away from you is modern legal rules that were designed to give an artificial legal and financial protection the inventor of said invention, idea, etc.

      If people were driven to invent for the betterment of the human race rather than their personal financial gain, these artificial restrictions on a basic human right wouldn't exist.

      You are making an assertion that it is moral to withhold a lifesaving cure for those who can't afford it. I find that disturbing. There is very little morality in modern IP laws. It's all about profit. I guess it could be moral to you if you are a Ferengi... But back to your "cure" example. It is simply amazing how much government funded (that means TAXPAYER funded) research ends up with privately patented drugs. This is the case with MOST government funded research by the way, such as with NASA, DOD, DOE, etc.

    3. Re:Real information rights!!! by Znork · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "If people were driven to invent for the betterment of the human race rather than their personal financial gain, these artificial restrictions on a basic human right wouldn't exist."

      Except IP rights were originally not created as an innovation incentive, they were originally a intended to enrich the friends of the crown in exchange for their support (salt monopolies, stationers guild, etc); ie, an alternative taxation system.

      Those monopolies were scaled back, but through propaganda campaigns (claiming how 'necessary' they were for 'innovation', or how 'authors' needed to be 'protected') the monopolists managed to at least partially retain their priviliges.

      Creative people are driven to invent for the betterment of the human race. Merchants, on the other hand, tend to be driven to find ways to evade competition. Avoiding competition is what the whole IP is, and always has been, about.

  2. You Can't Own Public Domain by Flwyd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Wait, wait... by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Problem here:

    Though the world of YouTube and podcasts seems like a place that 'requires' laws


    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.)
  4. Re:Why does *anyone* have to own this stuff? by David+McBride · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.


    Commercial distributors are very well aware of this fact; they've been profiting from it for decades.

    The reason for introducing this new 'broadcast right' is so that they can continue to do so as they have been in the face of competition.

    Sadly, this is not a new development - this activity has been ongoing for some years. See also: http://www.eff.org/IP/broadcastflag/