Big conglomerates would be able to claim some new rights even on public domain works–just by transmitting them. The bad guys have had the audacity to include that proposal in a new international treaty. Will the treaty enjoy the blessing of copyright ‘crats at the international level like Kamil Idris, pictured to the left (more on him below)? Don’t be surprised.
Maybe it’s time for a fresh term. You’ve heard of vanity laws like the DMCA–bought by and written for members of specific industries. How about “vanity treaty”? Yoo-hoo, John Dean and you other Presidential candidates? Guess you’re taking your usual snoozes.
Below is a warning from James Love at the Consumer Project on Technology, with italics added by us:
From November 3 to 5, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) will meet in Geneva to decide how to proceed on proposals for a new global intellectual property treaty. The proposed treaty concerns a system of ownership for material transmitted over wireless means such as television, radio and satellite, as well as wired communications over cable networks, and also over Internet computer networks.
This proposal expands or gives new rights to transmitters of information, even if they are not the creators of that information. Rights that are normally reserved to creators and performers would be afforded to organizations that merely transmit creations and performances–even if those works are in the public domain, or if those works’ authors wish to have the works distributed without restriction.
There are proposals to extend coverage to broadcast, cablecast, and webcasting technologies, and the treaty will be referred to here as the “casting” treaty…
Oh, well. This is DMCAism in action. All bytes must be owned and DRMed to turn the Multitudes into jailbait if they dislike corporately optimized theft.
I’d be curious to know how Kamil Idris, WIPO’s director general, stands on the treaty proposal. Is he siding with the bad guys? I do see more than a trace of greedster-speak in his statement below from the WIPO Web site:
In today’s economy, a country’s success is measured more and more by its possession and exploitation of such assets; and our increasingly interlinked world gives heightened importance and worth to inventive ideas, discoveries and artistic expression, particularly when they are turned into currencies of value through the use of the intellectual property system.”
So giving the big entertainment conglomerate even more rights will improve the planet? I went on to Idris’s book, Intellectual Property – A Power Tool for Economic Growth–which contains the following gem in Chapter 6:
The multinational recording companies are vitally concerned with the discovery, nurturing, development, exposure, and commercialization of new talent, new songwriters, new singers, new musicians, new groups , and new music. This process is ultimately their lifeblood, and one way they can secure their future is to keep a constant and large flow of new talent moving through their systems…
And letting the greedsters steal free access to the public domain is supposed to accomplish this? Oh, well. The Idris book is subversively free and, in this case, worth all of what you pay for it.
Adding to the fun, just consider where Kamil Idris comes from–Sudan. I ventured over to the Contemporary Africa Database and looked up his country under literature. I found these statistics:
Children’s Writers (0)
Editors (0)
Folklorists (0)
Novelists (4)
Playwrights (0)
Poets (3)
Screenwriters (0)
Other Literature (4)
Not exactly a place to be confused with Manhattan. But presumably Time Warner and the rest will pay big bucks to the locals to make up for the money Sudan spends in the future on U.S. entertainment transmitted through the Net. I mean, U.S. publishers and megachains are crying for Sudanese writers’ works, right?
