The
World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)'s ruling body, the
General Assembly, has rejected a proposal by a copyright committee
to send the proposal straight to a conference to be finalised. The
proposal must be approved by two more meetings before it can
be the subject of an approving diplomatic conference, the General
Assembly ruled.
If passed as it currently stands the treaty would create brand
new intellectual property (IP) rights in television broadcasts.
Designed to prevent the international pirating of TV signals, it
has attracted the ire of internet broadcasters who say that it
extends WIPO regulation to the internet. WIPO says that a new
treaty is needed to replace the currently active decades-old one,
the 1961 Rome Convention.
The copyright committee of WIPO, the Standing Committee on
Copyrights and Related Rights, had proposed that the treaty
progress straight to a diplomatic conference next summer, which
would be the forum for its adoption by WIPO.
The Assembly, though, noted that there was not a significant
enough consensus among member states and said that the treaty must
be the subject of two meetings in 2007 to attempt to achieve
consensus. India, the US and Brazil had objected to the treaty
being progressed immediately to a conference.
"A diplomatic conference is now contingent upon member states
reaching consensus where there are currently great differences such
as the inclusion of anti-circumvention measures in the treaty
and outlawing Internet retransmissions of programs,” said
Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, a civil liberties IP
law pressure group which addressed the General Assembly.
“While proponents of the Broadcast Treaty hail this as a
victory, since a diplomatic conference may still be convened next
year, the General Assembly’s refusal to rubber-stamp the
decision of the SCCR Chairman is the real victory at WIPO," said
Gross.
The proposed treaty creates a new right in the content of
broadcasts for broadcasters, even if the creator of the content is
a third party. Some content creators and legal experts have warned
that this means that creators will not be permanently in control of
content to which they currently have the principal rights.
"This is a right just for transmitting something, and it exists
on top of the existing copyright [in the broadcast]," Rufus
Pollock, a director of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a member
of the board of the Open Rights Group, told OUT-LAW in June.
"You retain the copyright in your material," said James Boyle at
the time. Boyle is a law professor at Duke law School in North
Carolina and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public
Domain. "I, the broadcaster, get a right over any copy or
retransmission of my broadcast (which contains your material). Thus
if someone copied your movie from my broadcast they could infringe
both sets of rights."
The proposed treaty has also been opposed by a coalition of
technology companies, including Dell, HP, AT&T and Sony and
others. "Creating broad new intellectual property rights in order
to protect broadcast signals is misguided and unnecessary and risks
serious unintended negative consequences," says a protest document
signed by the technology companies in a campaign co-ordinated by
digital rights activist group the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF).
