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Just when it seems that international intellectual property agreements are making the world a narrower place than ever to live in, some good people come along and remind governments of why the information commons might be worth protecting, after all!

A meeting of WIPO people took place June 18-20, 2007 and while participants were supposed to finalize a basic proposal for a Broadcasting Treaty, they didn’t get very far. According to James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI):

Technically, the subject of the Broadcasting Treaty will continue to be on the agenda of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, but with a fairly tough hurdle before it can move to a diplomatic conference — after there is agreement on the objectives, scope and object of protection, topics for which there is no agreement in sight.

Please read the short news stories below — they provide some much-needed coverage to a media issue that had little coverage prior to the collapse of the negotiations last week.

Many, many thanks are due to Manon Ress, James Love, Thiru Balasubramaniam, and other activists at Knowledge Ecology International and in the A2K movement.

-SIO

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Piracy collapses broadcasting treaty
By Frances Williams in Geneva
Published: June 24 2007 17:21 | Last updated: June 24 2007 17:21

…developing countries in Latin America and Asia, led by Brazil and India, have opposed the push by European and African governments for broad new rights that would protect television programmes from unauthorised retransmission for up to 50 years.

Critics say the proposed new rights would overlay existing copyrights, restrict access to programme content that is now in the public domain, prevent legitimate private copying for personal use, and stifle technological innovation.

U.N. broadcasting treaty talks suffer setback
Mon Jun 25, 2007 10:09AM EDT

Efforts to clinch a long-sought international broadcasting treaty have suffered a setback from lingering disagreements over signal piracy and the Internet, a top U.N. official said on Monday.

WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Dead…For Now
Michael Hedges - June 25, 2007

“Several country delegations began to ask deeper questions about the rationale for the treaty, and examined ways to limiting the scope and nature of the treaty,” said James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International, reviewing Friday’s wimpy finale. “In the end, the
broadcasters demanded too much, and made too few concessions, for the treaty to move forward. Delegates at WIPO were no longer willing to ignore issues of access to knowledge, or the control of anticompetitive practices.”

Talks on global broadcast treaty fail
By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jun 22, 8:27 AM ET

The treaty fell victim to disagreements over issues such as whether protection against piracy should cover only traditional broadcasting methods — meaning cable, antenna and satellite signals — or whether it should include retransmission over the Internet, he said.

European countries wanted to give broadcasters rights over any content they transmit — even if they did not originally produce the content. That type of rights-based treaty is opposed by electronics and telecommunication companies like Intel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., as well as librarian groups and consumer advocates. They say it would stifle technological innovation and could prevent people from playing legal music or films over their home networks.
…
The biggest loser in this episode is WIPO. Failure to bring the Broadcasting Treaty to a Diplomatic Conference reflects badly on SCCR members and very badly on WIPO General Secretary Kamil Idris. Several developed nations, the United States included, find their constituents better served within the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty. Traditional media will continue to chase “free-riders” but international treaties have broad stakeholders evermore diligent in defending common sense content and distribution rights.

Yay!

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), as many of you know, is that organization in charge of domain names and IP addresses. While they claimed to be an international group, and had an international board of directors, they worked on behalf of the US Government and that tie was known to be a strong one. So enter this story by Kieren McCarthy for The Register on July 27th:

In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.

Having been the internet’s instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organisation ICANN, making the organisation a more international body.

The assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer indicated that “it was no longer viable for one government to retain such power over the future of a global resource.” Hear hear. But at the same time, they’ve got big Net Neutrality and Broadcasting/Webcasting plans, so maybe they only want the web to be a “global resource” where the private sector is concerned.

McCarthy goes on to note that while there was some internationalism represented by the meeting’s attendees, all had English as their first language. Therefore, it will be interesting to see the degree to which ICANN does become more globally representative, open and democratic (though given their record for being VERY closed, any trend toward “open” is welcome!) If you’re interested in ICANN and Big Internet Policy, have a look at Wikipedia’s “Alternatives to ICANN” page which makes for interesting thinking.

-S.

I’ve been doing some reading about the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty recently, and I thought it would be interesting to try to guage some of the perceptions about its reach. So I sent an e-mail to about 50 people explaining that there’s an international treaty on the go that’s aiming to protect broadcasters - so they want to make it totally illegal (and enforceable with new technology built into your stereo/tv equipment) to tape anything you hear on the radio or on TV without the permission of the broadcaster. They also want to make it so that if they do grant you permission to copy, you can’t, say, forward through the ads on the video you’ve made of your favourite TV show. And I posed the question: how long do you think a broadcasting corporations would want this kind of exclusive right?

The answer is 50 years.

I thought I’d be able to carve up some sort of “average” that the 46 respondents came up with. But no go: there seemed to be two classes of answers. The first was comprised of the people who guessed big: 50, 75, and 100 years (many guessed infinity, and while that’s totally what the broadcasters want, thank goodness they don’t have those kinds of rights yet). The second group tended to guess “small” and in the neighbourhood of 2, 3, 5, 7 years.

Outliers aside, I think this distribution is a pretty interesting one: there’s a split between people who guessed at the extent to which mass media corporations can control access to information (and who understanding the game, as one person said, according to “GBT (Greedy Bastard Theory)”) and those who are far more optimistic.

I thought it was really interesting, too, that some people compared how much time broadcasters should be allowed to protect their signal compared to how long they’d actually want to. Of course, the numbers tended to be drastically different as the “should” numbers were heaps smaller than the “wants.”

Here are some interesting quotes from some of the people who responded:

A train of thought on the tracks: “I’d like to hope that if I miss something important on TV right NOW, that I could watch it around the time that I retire (at the latest)…maybe in about 40 years. I hope it is not more than 40 years. My guess is 40 years. It would be funny if it was something much shorter, say 30 days or something. I am now curious. There is no way that this thing is going to go through.”

Drawing the relationship to copyright and the continual push for term extensions: “Similar to how others like Disney keep pushing to extend copyright length - death + 50yrs, death + 60yrs, death + 75yrs, do we hear death+100years?”

…and the other big factor for Canucks: “With continuing media consolidation (Bell and CHUM most recently), it will likely be more” (…more on this week’s consolidation story here) .

An astute observation about motives: “You would expect that they may give up if the program became available for sale, as a DVD of a TV show, for example, because the adfree product would be available. But they probably will still want everyone to watch the commercials in order to encourage them to buy the packaged format. ”

On advertising more generally: “My questions is this: Can we not please have FIVE free advertising minutes a day? There must be a mental health argument for it. Sometimes I try to see how long I can go before seeing an ad for something - and it’s always less than 5 minutes in-between. A billboard here, a brand name large as life on someone’s t-shirt there, a logo on everything on display at the library, a CLA conference program riddled with sponsor names…. I actually suspect there are product shots in my dreams. Honestly. They should leave me alone just for a little while every day. They make me want to run away and live in an intentional community.” Amen.

On the ability to ignore whatever comes along and create alternative media instead: “The quicker these abounded tentacles of misinformation bury themselves in bureaucracy and legalities, the sooner we can leave them to their acquired fate. The question should be whether or not we care to acknowledge their dominion over media, and do we care enough to initiate a more substantial role in creating it independently. Let them have their ‘it’l. Those who feel controlled will also feel a need to resist - glorious.”

…or circumvent it: “talk about going to heroic lengths to make BitTorrent even more popular than it already is” and “They’ll never make technology we can’t circumvent.” My concern is that the more technology they invent and implement, the fewer the number of people who can successfully learn how to hack it…

And, of course, the million dollar question, “How do we stop this?” I’m not really sure. I think it involves writing some letters if you care enough. Talk to an MLA or MP (I’ve never done that but maybe it’s time I started). International stuff is tricky because they do such a good job of diffusing responsibility. If the treaty actually becomes a reality, I think it’ll be important to participate in hacking, spreading hacks, and funding hacks.

In the meantime, one important step is probably to learn more about the issues, particularly since they *do* want to bring webscasting into the treaty (it was included as part of the main text but it’s been put into an “optional” appendix to the main text). Here are two sites to get you started:

Electronic Frontier Foundation on the treaty; and the Consumer Project on Technology also has quite a few resources, along with quite a detailed history and a link to the latest draft of the actual treaty.

Just a final point: this treaty is only about signals. Not about content. That means, even if the *content* is in the public domain or creative commons, it’s made instantly proprietary by being broadcast. You can access the content however you want to through other means, but you can’t record it. Smart, eh? I reckon they’re smart. Greedy bastards, yes, but smart ones with smart lawyers.

-S.