Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO
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.
“It is disturbing to learn that African governments support copyright exceptions”, said author Elinor Sisulu, in a pamphlet distributed by the International Authors' Forum to delegates at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva this week. At a side event organized by IFFRO (the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) on Tuesday, Katie Webb, Administrator of the Forum, painted a dire picture of authors living below the poverty line and laid the blame squarely upon the copyright exceptions used by libraries and educational institutions. Canada was singled out for particular criticism for having broadened educational exceptions in 2012, leading to a reduction in royalties paid to a monopoly collecting society.
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.
EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.
More about those proposals will be coming in a series of updates this week. But first, why are we at WIPO at all? Here's a short history lesson to explain.
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