The World Intellectual Property Organisation is currently contemplating the Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty, which extends the rights of over-the-air broadcasters to bar the retransmission of content they assemble, even when they don’t hold the copyrights to that content. The extension comes in two forms.
First, an earlier treaty (which the U.S. did not sign) gave broadcasters 20 years’ of exclusive rights to programs or music they assembled in their program line-ups, even if the programming were, for example, in the public domain. The new treaty would extend this right by an additional 30 years.
Secondly, the treaty is contemplating the extension of these exclusive rights to webcasting, and apparently the U.S. is backing it. The EFF is up in arms over this concept, and intellectual property experts have generally condemned it. (See this piece from the Financial Times courtesy of Groklaw.)
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:29 AM|Comments(0)
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