Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Public Knowledge remains deeply concerned about the prospect of further work on the broadcast treaty.
Our previous concerns with the most recent draft of the treaty still stand.
Giving broadcasters rights in fixations of transmissions creates, at least in some jurisdictions, a new property right. This new grant of rights has never been adequately justified in terms of solving a concrete problem that is not already covered by existing agreements and existing law. The existence of competitive pressure alone is not a justification for a treaty.
Meanwhile, this right creates new complications with respect to the underlying content contained within the signal. Authorized uses of the work, or uses permitted by limitations and exceptions to copyright, would still be subject to decisions made by a broadcasting entity exerting another layer of rights over a delayed retransmission of a fixed broadcast. Public domain works whose originals are inaccessible to the public would be subject to the control of a broadcaster, even after their copyright terms had expired.
Also, language prohibiting devices that are merely capable of decrypting signals targets an inappropriately wide range of devices, including personal computers.
Beyond the substance of the proposed treaty language, we remain concerned about the state of negotiations on this topic. None of the interventions expressed yesterday or today suggest a significant departure from the positions that left this Committee with its marked lack of consensus last year, as noted in the statements of a number of delegations and in the non-paper introduced in the interim between the special sessions. This is not an encouraging sign for making progress on the treaty, or of making progress on the Committee’s wider agenda.
