To all:
The below is from Cory Doctorow of the EFF (Cory is also one of the guys behind boingboing.net and a great science fiction writer). I am of the view that intellectual property issues are a graver danger to Internet users and small and medium-sized service providers than anything that any of you face domestically. I implore you all to read the below and to provide your support. You can do so by sending the following to [EMAIL PROTECTED] :
<cut text>
Name: [insert name here] Company: [insert company here] Title [insert title here]
Please add me as a signatory to the WIPO Broadcast Treaty letter
</cut text>
Do it for your businesses, do it for your customers, do it for your children. Thanks.
=========================================================================================================================================
Front and center in EFF's international work is the fight against the Broadcast Treaty at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization. This is a treaty that will create a copyright-like right for anyone who transmits information -- beyond the copyright in the information itself.
Worst of all is that some IT companies have asked to have this extended to the Web, so that anyone who, for example, creates a Google for video that scrapes and indexes video files on the net would have to go and get permission from every site he scraped. Hell, they even want to extend it to works that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, so that even if the artist says "anyone can transmit this," web-hosting-companies get to trump her generosity. They're not limiting it to video, either -- they want this to cover images and sounds -- basically, all the stuff we find online today.
Only the "pro" side has sent a lobbyist to WIPO to endorse this, and so as far as the national delegates can tell, the whole tech industry is behind this. We know that's not true: this is a system for protecting incumbents from new entrants to the market, not a signal-theft protection mechanism.
We're taking an open letter to WIPO in November that says as much: don't do this on our behalf, we think it's a dumb idea. The letter's below: do you think that your company could sign onto it?
--
The World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is undertaking a Treaty on the Protection of the Broadcasting Organizations. This treaty confers upon the transmitters of information a host of "related" or "pseudo" copyrights that have the potential to trump copyright.
One proposal within the Treaty would extend these pseudo-copyrights to the Internet, by means of a controversial "Webcasting Provision." While there has been little support from the national delegations for this proposal, the insistent voice of self-styled representatives of the technology industry has been loud enough to see to it that this proposal has persisted through draft after draft of the Treaty.
We, the undersigned representatives of technology businesses large and small, totally reject the idea that the Internet needs or will benefit from the extension of these pseudo-copyrights to so-called "Webcasters."
Briefly, we reject the Webcasting Provision for the following reasons:
1. The Internet depends on permission-free access. The Net has always stretched copyright to suit its own ends, demanding exemptions in law and practice for caching, in-lining, scraping and crawling. When authors or rights-holders' permission has been required for fixation, copying, retransmission or decoding, the negotiation of licenses from creators and rights-holders have provided ample protection to all parties. Adding a new layer of intermediaries to the re-use of information on the Internet benefits no one save those intermediaries: if an Internet company has the rights to a work, or need not secure the rights to a work due to a limitation in copyright, or if the work is in the public domain, there is no rational reason to require that company to seek out the permission of an intermediary whose sole creative contribution to the work is in making it available.
2. There is no demonstrable problem. Internet businesses are famously, legendarily well-capitalized from angels, venture capitalists, public markets, private investors, governments and every other source of capital imaginable. It is a certainty that the creation of a new psuedo-copyright will slow down adoption and innovation in Internet markets by requiring all content-related businesses to negotiate yet another layer of license agreements before they can offer new products or services to the public. And yet there is no evidence that adding an additional legal layer between businesses and consumers will strengthen or encourage new businesses or creativity in the Internet sector. Proponents have offered no evidence of undercapitalization due to a lack of webcasting rights. Indeed, the businesses most volubly calling for Webcasting protection are among the best-capitalized in the history of the world: it strains credulity to believe that they will receive new financial assistance once they can assure investors of a right to exclude their competitors and new entrants from the market.
Our firms are the putative beneficiaries of your work in Geneva. We do not desire the "protection" you offer us, nor do we believe it will benefit us. Please do not grant our competitors this boon at our expense.
Thank you,
========================================================================================================================================
Regards Elliot Noss Tucows Inc.
