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.