WIPO Broadcasting Treaty deferred indefinitely

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Negotiations on the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty ended on Friday with some welcome news. WIPO Member States agreed to postpone the high-level intergovernmental Diplomatic Conference at which the draft treaty could have been adopted, and have moved discussions back to regular committee meetings, down a notch from the last two "Special Session" meetings.

The Diplomatic Conference had been scheduled to take place in November 2007. It has now been postponed indefinitely until Member States reach agreement on the objectives, specific scope and object of protection of the proposed treaty. Given the vast differences between Member States' positions that emerged this week on core parts of the treaty, agreement does not look likely in the near future. Although the treaty is still on WIPO's agenda and by no means dead, the practical effect of today's decision is that it is no longer on the fast track. That's good news indeed for the Internet Community, including the over 1500 podcasters who signed an Open Letter to WIPO expressing concern about the treaty, which EFF delivered to WIPO this week. Member States refused to set a date for a diplomatic conference. They rejected proposals from the WIPO Copyright Committee Chair, Mr. Jukka Liedes, to postpone the diplomatic conference to November/December 2008, to convene a further "Special Session" of the WIPO Copyright Committee focused on finalizing the treaty, and to create a "modern framework" for "webcasting organizations". Instead, it was agreed that the subject of protection of broadcasting and cablecasting organizations would stay on the agenda and be discussed in regular sessions of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. After the jump we have the full text of the conclusions of the meeting, together with notes from today's meeting.

Before a Diplomatic Conference can be convened, Member States must reach agreement on the core elements of a treaty - the objectives, specific scope and object of protection. While this week's informal session discussions may have helped clarify Member States' positions, it does not seem to have brought them closer. There is widespread agreement amongst many Member States, public interest NGOs. libraries and the tech industry that any treaty must focus on the issue of signal theft and not the creation of exclusive rights that will harm those communities. However, it's equally clear from this week that broadcasters will not settle for anything other than exclusive rights.

In the meantime, apart from pulling the plug on a diplomatic conference that seemed doomed for failure, as the delegate of India and Jamie Love of Knowledge Ecology International have both noted, today's decision also provides a much-needed opportunity for WIPO to start focusing on other initiatives, such as facilitating access to knowledge, evaluating the impact of legally-enforced technological protection measures on exceptions and limitations, and Chile's 2004 proposal for mandatory exceptions and limitations to copyright law for education, the disabled and libraries and archives. Now that would be good news indeed.
June 22, 2007.

National Association of Broadcasters knifes NPR and PBS at the United Nations anti-podcasting treaty negotiation

From Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

The National Association of Broadcasters of America has broken its own by-laws and trampled the position of NPR and PBS, endorsing a controversial policy at the United Nations.

This week, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization is holding a critical debate on the "Broadcast Treaty." This treaty would establish a new copyright-like right, but whereas copyright goes to people who make creative works, Broadcast Rights go to companies that broadcast other people's copyrighted works. The Broadcast Right isn't subject to the same fair use limits as copyright, which means that even if copyright lets you record a broadcast for criticism or parody, you will need to separately get an exemption under the Broadcast Right. More gravely, if means that if you license your work under Creative Commons, the people who distribute the files or air the program can overrule your generosity and insist that your fans not copy your work.

This treaty threatens the Internet as we know it. Novel services like YouTube and novel practice like podcasting would not exist today if this treaty was already implemented.

The General Assembly of WIPO has ordered Jukka Liedes, the chairman of the relevant committee to cut this out, instructing him to oversee a much narrower treaty that will block "theft of signals" (hacking free cable or satellite), while leaving all this other business off. The chairman has gone rogue, ignoring the direction of the Assembly and producing a draft that's even worse than the previous draft.

The Chairman isn't the only one who's gone rogue, though: the National Association of Broadcasters of America has been lobbying hard all week for the treaty. One problem: PBS and NPR -- members of NABA -- oppose the treaty and have not authorized the association to lobby for this measure.

"National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service do not support a Diplomatic Conference to adopt a treaty based on the April 20, 2007 non-paper because they do not believe the treaty provides adequate protection for the fair use of broadcast and cablecast matter for newsgathering and other purposes. Bell ExpressVu does not support a Diplomatic Conference because it believes the proposed exclusive retransmission right exceeds what is necessary to prevent signal piracy or protect investment and does not contain a reservation that would permit a signatory to limit or not apply the application of the retransmission right."