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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. "
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.
Arrogance like this just gets me so angry ...
Hypocrite, IP "rights" are the only bogus assertion around here.
... on importing slaves, and then if someone "stole" those slaves by freeing them, then I would say tough shit, that's the punishment you get for imposing false property rights.
Why don't you just way, "well it's OK for the King to choose what people are allowed to say as long as it makes sense and has a rational and moral component". And the appropiate response would be. FU, pull your head out and use the God given brain you were given to take things to their "rational" conclusion.