World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Treaty Information
For more information about the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Treaty currently currently being opposed by: "Intel, Sony, Panasonic, AT&T, Verizon, Dell, US Telecom (general), and EFF", to name a few large companies, check out http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2498804458776047141&hl=en.
The reasons to support the treaty are mentioned at 52:30.
What is the WIPO Treaty
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Treaty is a piece of legislation that could be adpoted by any county that wishes to be part of the treaty. The legislation defines new rights for "broadcasters" (think of any sort of broadcasting) that allow them to sue people that re-transmit their signal without their permission.
WIPO Treaty Motivation
The goal of the WIPO treaty is to protect the investment of broadcasters that have obtained the right to broadcast copyrighted information.
The result of the WIPO treaty is more limitation on the freedom to retransmit information you've received.
The people supporting this treaty have invested effort to obtain rights to legally broadcast the content and want to protect their investment. (Think YouTube, ABC, Google)
The argument for broadcaster rights goes: "I had to climb to the top of the mountain to get this information, and I'm not giving it to you for free. So you can either climb the mountain yourself, or pay me."
Notice that this is logic is completely legitimate, even for "publicly available" information that resides at the top of a mountain. (However, US courts would rule in favor of public good if a company claimed broadcasting rights over public domain information)
The mountain in this case is the effort required to obtain the right to broadcast the content. The information in this case is the content in question.
The Scenario
To understand the dynamics at hand, we'll walk through a scenario that demonstrates the invested interests of the different people involved.
The players:
1. Copyright holder: Art, the artist
2. Broadcaster: Mike, the broadcaster
3. Illegal broadcaster: IllegalJoe, the computer hacker.
Art, the artist creates content and holds a copyright on the content.
Art gives the content to Mike, the broadcaster with rights to publish it.
Mike publishes the content to the world, and everybody loves it.
IllegalJoe knows everybody likes the content, so he records it, and puts it on his own website to get ad-generated revenue.
Mike doesn't like this, because Mike's losing ad revenue.
Mike tells Art to sue IllegalJoe, but Art doesn't really care - Art's a hippie and doesn't care about money.
Mike loses value that should he feels should be protected, and starts WIPO.
The Question
The question here is "Does the theivery of the effort required to obtain broadcast rights reasonally motivate a broadcaster's right to limit re-transmittion of content distributed through their channels?"|
It's not surprising that the answer is not black and white.
Currently, I think the value provided by broadcasters is not substantial enough to motivate the proposed WIPO Treaty. In time, I think the value of the aggregation of content will increase, and either copyrights of "derived work" must protect the creator of aggregated content, or new laws (WIPO Treaty) must be created to protect the "broadcaster"/"creator" of aggregated content.
Life without broadcaster's rights
The below scenarios walk through models in which the broadcaster's right to broadcast is being de-valued, and nobody cares except the broadcaster, who should (maybe) have rights too.
Scenario: The owner of the copyright has no interest in protecting distribution of the work, but the distributor has invested in its distribution.
1. Suppose you create a home movie.
2. YouTube is willing to give you $10 for the rights to distribute your movie. You say "yes".
3. Now a person watches the movie on their computer and rebroadcasts it to a friend.
4. YouTube asks you to sue the person that is retransmitting your content, but you already got your $10 and really don't care about the retransmission.
5. YouTube has no way of stopping the retransmission of the leeched broadcast because only YOU, as the copyright owner, can defend their competitive advantage by stopping other broadcasters.
Conclusion: Distributers are locked into a "get paid as you provide" model of business (Ad-based revenue). The "get paid as you provide" model of business is great, if people aren't ALL rebroadcasting ALL the conent you worked so hard to get broadcast rights to. Currently, there is nothing stopping this sort of theivery. (This is how http://www.ebaumsworld.com came to be, stealing from http://somethingawful.com)
Alternatives, assuming broadcaster rights, would leverage the effort involved in aquiring the right to broadcast the content.
Broadcaster's work-around (any problems?):
1. YouTube creates a collection of 2 movies they've aquired the right to broadcast, and wants to protect "the way we organized these movies".
2. YouTube copyrights the "derived" content just as easily as a composer copywrites a piece of music as "the way I organized these notes."
3. Now YouTube can protects its own copyright on its own "derived" content.
Life with broadcaster's rights
Anyone can use public domain information.
For public domain content
1. If you hear a public domain song, you can play it anywhere.
For copyrighted content
1. If you hear a copyrighted song on the radio and the broadcaster does NOT maintain "broadcaster's rights", you can play it after:
a. You get permission to broadcast it from the copyright owner.
2. If you hear a copyrighted song on the radio and the broadcaster DOES maintain "broadcaster's rights", you can play it after:
a. You hear it from someone that doesn't maintain their broadcasting rights (or you purchase a license to re-broadcast), AND
b. You get permission to broadcast it from the copyright owner.
Personal Perspective
Personally, I think the WIPO Treaty goes a little bit too far for what is needed right now. The concepts involved if the WIPO Treaty passes will spur a whole new genre of broadcast oppritunities, laws, copyrights, and barriers to entry. I think that the current copyright laws are enough to protect content creators and initial copyright owners. I'm satisfied with a "get paid as you provide" model for content broadcasters and service providers (Comcast, YouTube, and Google) for now.
Action
1. Blog about it. The more we talk about it, the more people can understand the topic.
2. EFF Action related specifically to the WIPO treaty can be found at https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr009=ji0e7wbb31.app8a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=227.
3. If you have lots of time on your hands, I recommend reading the treaty as proposed July 31, 2006. http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sccr/en/sccr_15/sccr_15_2.pdf
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, often does really great and priceless work for everyone. Check them out at http://www.eff.org/.