Deeplinks Blog posts about Broadcasting Treaty
Last week negotiators from around the world came together as the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) standing committee on copyright (SCCR) resumed consideration of its two current work items: the on-again, off-again broadcasters' rights treaty, and the harmonization of minimum copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, and education.
In Jewish religious law, there is an offence called lifnei iver (literally, “before the blind”), that prohibits placing stumbling blocks before blind people, deriving from a verse of scripture also accepted by Christians and Muslims. This offense seems so obvious that it hardly requires a scripture verse to call it out. But the authors of the Torah obviously didn't count on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who are doing exactly that.
Video is an enormous part of the Internet today. At least two thirds of all Internet traffic is streaming video. YouTube is the third most-visited website in the US and the world, and its users add a mind-boggling 300 hours of new content every minute—dwarfing the video produced for broadcast or cable television. And unlike television, online video came into being without government oversight, all due to one important neutral platform for innovation—the Internet.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been working towards the development of a Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations since 1998; about three times as long as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have taken so far, but with far less to show for it. Part of the reason for the delay has been a fundamental lack of clarity about what the whole exercise is actually about.
For those of us following the continuing saga of the unnecessary and harmful WIPO Broadcasting Treaty, its latest manifestation is starting to have the feel of a tired movie franchise. Every few years, as soon as Hollywood thinks it can squeeze a few more dollars out of a new installment, the same bad idea gets rehashed with the same cast of characters, and still no substance.
But unlike a bad sequel, we can't just ignore each new round of negotiations: the interests pushing for the treaty are counting on a lapse of vigilance from the public in order to push the bad policy through.
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