To understand the negotiations this week at the WIPO SCCR 29, it is helpful to review an April 2014 document, endorsed by several broadcasting organizations.
The attached document* is a joint statement by 12 broadcasting organizations, on “THE OBJECTIVES, SPECIFIC SCOPE AND OBJECT OF THE PROPOSED WIPO BROADCASTERS’ TREATY”.
Signed by ABERT, ABU, ACT, AER, ASBU, AUB, CBU, EBU, IAB, NAB (USA), NABA and OTI, the document sets out an aggressive and in places radical agenda for new rights to broadcasting organization.
The broadcasters claim “a ‘right to prohibit’, instead of an exclusive right, would be ineffective.”
Broadcasters want their layer of exclusive rights, which would co-exist with copyright, and apply even to public domain materials, or to copyrighted material distributed under creative commons licenses, compulsory licenses, or under exceptions to copyright.
The broadcasters want their layer of exclusive rights to apply not only to information provided in over-the-air broadcasts to the public, but also when distributed using “new distribution streams, such as secondary digital channels,” and through encrypted pay-per-view services.
Broadcasters want the new WIPO treaty to cover transmissions that involve “demand for time- and place-convenient access to broadcasters’ signals,” using “all technological means and media platforms that exist today and will be developed in years to come.”
The broadcasters want post fixation rights in the content, and to claim rights in public domain materials, when the public domain information is obtained from broadcasting organization. The public’s access to public domain materials would be limited, unless the “public domain material [is] obtained from the same source as the broadcaster.”
Making everything worse is the fact that several other lobby groups want to benefit from the treaty. Already WIPO has agreed to make “cablecasting” organizations beneficiaries of the new rights, including in particular cable channels like HBO, ESPN, MSNBC, CSPAN, Sky Sports, TNT, etc. And, cable and broadcasting organizations efforts to expand the rights to include delivery over the Internet including for on demand services, opens the door for this to become a new right that will apply more generally to distributions of information over the web.
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* The PDF was created April 24, 2014