Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter recently sent a letter to the Copyright Office and the PTO, expressing their concern about the WIPO Broadcast Treaty. In it, they voice many of the same concerns that have brought together a broad alliance of public interest groups, libraries, technology groups, and communications providers against the treaty as it is currently envisioned at WIPO.
Specifically, the senators (who are, respectively, the Chair and Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee) are worried that granting broadcasters a separate, 20-year-long IP right in broadcasts could interfere with the fair use of works, as well as complicating the legal hoops that consumers would have to jump through. The letter also addresses the fact that copyright owners and ISPs could run into unintended liabilities under the treaty.
The letter ends with a strong recommendation for a more narrowly tailored treaty, and, if the treaty ends up looking like its current drafts, for the U.S. Delegation to walk away from a treaty that would be contrary to current U.S. law.
We certainly think it’s important that the WIPO Broadcast Treaty not make a bad IP situation worse, and it’s comforting to know that the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee agree.
I have to admit some
I have to admit some confusion on the whole broadcast rights issue. What exactly is the problem that this “solution” is trying to solve? How prevalent are acts which would be violations of the rule the broadcasters are trying to implement? For original content, aren’t broadcasters already protected under current copyright law?
The alleged problem is
The alleged problem is people taking broadcast signals and rebroadcasting them into markets not intended by the original broadcaster. Some examples have included baseball games aired in the US being broadcast around the Caribbean.
As for the original content question, I agree that copyright law solves a lot of the problems. Proponents of the treaty say a couple of things. First, some countries don’t protect news and sports programming under copyright (which is why there are more broadcast rights in those countries than in the US), and second, they will say that under copyright law, only the copyright owner can sue, not the broadcaster.
I’m not entirely convinced by these arguments; I can see that preventing unauthorized retransmission is a valid goal; but the Broadcast Treaty is really set up for a different sort of IP system—one that doesn’t grant as much copyright protection as ours does.
Basically, kludging a European, Rome Convention-type system onto US law causes many more problems than it solves.
Thanks much for the
Thanks much for the explanation. Probably the fact that the broadcast treaty isn’t really compatible with current US law is why I was confused.
As for the merits of the treaty, it seems like this is the wrong approach to solving the problem. Coverage of sporting events is already protected in US copyright law whether it’s broadcast over the airwaves, shown on cable or pay-per-view, or distributed direct-to-DVD. If there’s a hole in international copyright protections, it’s in the lack of similar regulations in other nations (regardless of content category), and that’s what the fix should be focusing on.
The implications of granting an additional right to a broadcaster is frightening. It will have a chilling effect on fair use by adding yet another copyright stakeholder to the picture - another party who could potentially file suit against you for making a fair use of something they happened to broadcast, even if they provided no additional original content to that broadcast.
Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here :) I’m just glad that Leahy and Specter understand what the problem is.