This is worth reading. Skip down to the Joint Statement if you're in
a hurry. Basically, "webcasters" are trying to create new monopoly
powers beyond copyright, and are trying to get it done via an
international treaty in order to avoid any real congressional or
public participation.
Eric
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MEDIA ADVISORY - PRESS CONFERENCE
March 15, 2006
Contact: Eric Hensal
Phone: 202-262-9152
address@hidden
WHAT: Press Conference on WIPO Broadcasters Treaty
The US Delegation to WIPO is pursuing a treaty that
would:
- directly undermine network neutrality
- serve as a legal basis that could oblige the US
government to mandate a "broadcast flag" requirement
on privately-owned VCRs and computers
Just as legislators are taking up these issues, this
international policy instrument is being pursued through
treaty-making processes under the Executive Branch. The
power to develop copyright and communications policy is
explicitly assigned to Congress under Article I, Section
8 of the US Constitution.
Consumer Project for Technology links on the
Broadcasters Treaty:
<http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/index.html>
WHEN: March 15th at 2:00 pm.
WHERE: Nearby the CEA Entertainment Technology Policy Summit,
taking place concurrently at the Ronald Reagan
International Trade Center.
ASAE Center for Association Leadership
Phone: (202) 326-9550
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20004 USA
Entrances on 14th Street and at 13th & Pennsylvania Ave
The Federal Triangle metro stop (blue and orange lines)
connects to the International Trade Center by covered
passageway. The Center will be on your immediate right
as you enter.
WHO: Various signers of this joint statement to Congress,
including spokespersons from New Yorkers for Fair Use,
Interactionlaw, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, Alliance for Community Media, Washington
Bureau for ISP Advocacy and Daniel Golding of the Burton
Group.
DETAIL: The Broadcasters Treaty creates a new set of exclusive
rights that would apply to the medium over which
broadcasts are transmitted -- including the Internet
transport. These rights include a new "exclusive right
to authorize fixations" which is ill-suited for the
Internet. The treaty will break network neutrality and
will establish a legal basis for the broadcast flag, at
a time when these issues have finally been taken up by
Congress. In fact, the treaty would establish the legal
basis for pervasive end-to-end content control that can
reach all the way across the network, through privately-
owned computers, to analog input/output jacks.
---
Joint Statement to Congress and Members of the US Delegation to
WIPO on the Broadcasters Treaty
http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/wipo.xcast/xcast.jointstatement.xhtml
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House Committee on Science
U.S. House Committee on Small Business
U.S. House Committee on International Relations
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
(Full list of House and Senate Committee recipients listed below)
Dear Chairpersons and Ranking Members:
Negotiations are currently underway at the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) to develop a treaty giving
broadcasters power to suppress currently lawful communications.
The United States delegation is also advocating similar rights
for "webcasters" through which the authors of new works
communicate them to the public.
Some provisions of the proposed "Treaty on the Protection of
Broadcasting Organizations" would merely update and standardize
existing legal norms, but several proposals would require
Congress to enact sweeping new laws that give private parties
control over information, communication, and even copyrighted
works of others, whenever they have broadcast or "webcast" the
work.
The novel policy areas addressed by this treaty go beyond
ordinary treaty-making that seeks worldwide adherence to U.S.
policy. Instead, this initiative invades Congress' prerogative to
develop and establish national policy. Indeed, even as Congress
is debating how best to protect network neutrality, treaty
negotiators are debating how to eliminate it.
The threat to personal liberties presented by this treaty is too
grave to allow these new policy initiatives to be handed over to
an unelected delegation to negotiate with foreign countries,
leaving Congress with the sole option whether to acquiesce. When
dealing with policies that are related to copyright and
communications, Congress's assigned powers and responsibility
under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution become
particularly important. We urge two important steps. First, the
new proposed regulations should be published in the Federal
Register, with an invitation to the public to comment. Second,
the appropriate House and Senate committees should hold hearings
to more fully explore the impact of these novel legal
restrictions on commerce, freedom of speech, copyright holders,
network neutrality, and communications policy.
Americans currently enjoy substantial freedoms with respect to
broadcast and webcast communications. Under the proposed treaty,
the existing options available to commercial enterprises and
entrepreneurs as well as the general public to communicate news,
information and entertainment would be limited by a new private
gatekeeper who adds nothing of value to the content.
Communications policies currently under discussion at the FCC
would be impacted. Individuals and small businesses would be
limited in their freedom of speech. Copyright owners would find
their freedom to license their works limited by whether the work
had been broadcast or webcast. The principle of network
neutrality, already the subject of congressional hearings, would
be all but destroyed.
As able as the staff of the United States Patent and Trademark
Office and the Library of Congress may be, it was never intended
that they alone should stake out the United States national
policy to be promoted before an unelected international body in
entirely new areas abridging civil liberties. Congress should be
the first to establish America's national policies in this new
area so that our WIPO delegation will have sufficient guidance to
achieve legitimate objectives without impairing Constitutional
principles such as freedom of speech and assembly, without
impairing the value of copyrights, and without granting to
private parties arbitrary power to suppress existing freedoms or
burden new technologies.
We cannot afford for Congress to wait for the Senate to be
presented with a fully formed treaty calling for the enacting of
domestic law at odds with fundamental American liberties foreign
to American and international legal norms, and that would bring
to a close many of the benefits of widespread personal computing
and the end-to-end connectivity brought by the Internet. We ask
Congress to use its authority now to shape these important
communications policies impacting constitutionally based
copyright laws and First Amendment liberties.
Signed,
(Affiliations for individual signers are for identification
only. Endorsing organizations are listed separately below.)
William Abernathy, Independent Technical Editor
Anthony Aiello, Development Editor, Reference Division,
Oxford University Press
Moe Lawrence Aitel, PE, CEO A-TECH Engineering
David G. Andersen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
Carnegie Mellon University
Scottie D. Arnett, President, Info-Ed, Inc.
Jonathan Askin, Pulver.com
John Bachir, Ibiblio.org
Tom Barger, DMusic.com
Fred Benenson, FreeCulture.org
Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL Project
Daniel Berninger, VON Coalition
Eric Blossom, GNU Radio
Joshua Breitbart, Media Tank
Daniel Bricklin, bricklin.com, co-creator of VisiCalc
spreadsheet
Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime
Michael Calabrese, Vice President, New America Foundation
Dave A. Chakrabarti, Community Technologist, CTCNet Chicago
Steven Cherry, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum
Andrew Clausen, economics PhD student
Steven Clift, Publicus.Net
Roland J. Cole, J.D., Ph.D., Executive Director, Software
Patent Institute
Gordon Cook, Editor, Publisher and Owner since 1992 of the
COOK Report on Internet Protocol
Kees Cook, kernel.org
Walt Crawford, Editor/Publisher, Cites & Insights
Chris Dashiell, Film Critic, cinescene.com
Cynthia H. de Lorenzi, Washington Bureau for ISP Advocacy
Cory Doctorow, Author, journalist, Fulbright Chair, EFF
Fellow
Marshall Eubanks, CEO, AmericaFree.tv
David J. Farber, Carnegie Mellon University, University of
Pennsylvania
Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Media Access Project
Miles R. Fidelman, President, The Center for Civic
Networking
Richard Forno (bio: http://www.infowarrior.org/rick.html)
Jim Fruchterman, President, Benetech
Anthony W. Gallipeau, IT Specialist, Newell/Rubbermaid
Laura N. Gasaway, Professor of Law, University of North
Carolina
Paul Gherman, University Librarian, Vanderbilt University
Shubha Ghosh, Professor of Law, Southern Methodist
University
Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University
Daniel Golding, Senior Industry Analyst, Burton Group,
www.burtongroup.com
Fred R. Goldstein, Ionary Consulting
Robert Gregory, I. T. Manager, Community Action
Opportunities
Robin Gross, IP Justice
Shaun Gummere, Director of Web Services & Lecturer in Web
Design, Simmons College
Michael Gurstein, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Jon Hall, President, Linux International
Chuck Hamaker, Atkins Library, University of North Carolina
- Charlotte
Charles M. Hannum, consultant, founder of The NetBSD Project
Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group
David R Hughes, CEO, Old Colorado City Communications, 1993
EFF Pioneer Award
Paul Hyland, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility
David S. Isenberg, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, isen.com, LLC
Charles Jackson, Adjunct Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, George Washington University
Robert Jacobson, Ph.D., Independent Scholar and Editor,
Information Design
Saleem Jahangeer, Ph.D.
Stuart Jansen, www.DevUtah.com
Seth Johnson, New Yorkers for Fair Use
Paul Jones, School of Information and Library Science,
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Peter D. Junger, Professor of Law Emeritus, Case Western
Reserve University
Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D., Professor of Software Engineering,
Florida Institute of Technology
Jerry Kang, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Dennis S. Karjala, Jack E. Brown Professor of Law, Arizona
State University
Ken Katkin, Associate Professor of Law, Salmon P. Chase
College of Law
Dan Krimm, Independent Musician
Michael J. Kurtz, Astronomer and Computer Scientist,
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Bruce Kushnick, chairman, Teletruth
Jonathan Lawson, Reclaim the Media
Edward Lee, Assistant Professor of Law, The Ohio State
University, Moritz College of Law
Andrew Lippman, Senior Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab
Michael Maranda, President, Association For Community
Networking
Kevin Marks, mediAgora
Anthony McCann, www.beyondthecommons.com
Sean McLaughlin, founder, Hawaii Consumers
Kembrew McLeod, Associate Professor, Dept. of Communication,
University of Iowa
Sascha Meinrath, Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless
Network, Free Press
Wilson Michaels, Software Developer (Retired)
Edmund Mierzwinski, Consumer Program Director, U.S. Public
Interest Research Group
Lee N. Miller, Ph.D., Editor Emeritus, Ecological Society of
America
Edward Mills, Independent Technology Consultant
John Mitchell, InteractionLaw
Tom Moritz, Chief, Knowledge Management, Getty Research
Institute
Milton L. Mueller, Internet Governance Project
Andrew Odlyzko, University of Minnesota
Ken Olthoff, Advisory Board, EFF Austin
Andy Oram, Editor, O'Reilly Media
Dave Pentecost, documentary television producer
Bruce Perens (bio at http://perens.com/Bio.html)
Ian Peter, Senior Partner, Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd
Jan L. Peterson, Software Developer
Steve Peterson, Independent Software Consultant
Malla Pollack, Law Professor, American Justice School of Law
Jeff Pulver, Pulver.com
Tom Raftery, PodLeaders.com
David P. Reed, contributor to original Internet Protocol
design
Jerome H. Reichman, Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law
Anthony Riddle, Executive Director, Alliance for Community
Media
Lawrence Rosen, Rosenlaw & Einschlag; Stanford University
Lecturer in Law
Bruce Schneier, security technologist and CTO, Counterpane
Charles D. Seaman, Citizen of the United States, Marietta,
Georgia
Peter M. Shane, Ohio State University
Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU
David J. Smith, Specialist of Distributed Content
Distribution and Protocols, Michigan State University
Michael E. Smith, LXNY
Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation
Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. Student, UNC Chapel Hill
Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Jay Sulzberger, New Yorkers for Fair Use
Penelope A. Swanson, Head, Cataloguing Division, SFU
Aaron Swartz, infogami
Bernard G. Tomasso, Librarian (Retired), Port Byron (NY)
Central School
Rahul Tongia, Ph.D., Systems Scientist, School of Computer
Science (ISRI) / Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy,
Carnegie Mellon University
Stephen H. Unger, Professor, Computer Science Department,
Columbia University
Jennifer Urban, University of Southern California, Gould
School of Law
Eric F. Van de Velde, Ph.D., Director, Library Information
Technology, California Institute of Technology
Tom Vogt, independent computer security researcher
Quinn Weaver, Fairpath Communications
David Weinberger, Harvard Berkman Center
Moshe Weitzman, Open Source Software Developer
Frannie Wellings, Free Press
Adam Werbach, President, Ironweed Films
Stephen Wolff, igewolff.net
Brett Wynkoop, Wynn Data Ltd.
John Young, Cryptome.org
Endorsing Organizations:
Association For Community Networking (AFCN)
The Center for Civic Networking
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Contact Communications
The COOK Report on Internet Protocol
Cryptome.org
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
Dandin Group
Fairpath Communications
FreeCulture.org
Free Press
Free Software Foundation
Hawaii Consumers
Illinois Community Technology Coalition
Internet Archive
Ionary Consulting
IP Justice
isen.com, LLC
mediAgora
New Yorkers for Fair Use
Old Colorado City Communications
Podleaders.com
Prometheus Radio Project
Pulver.com
Reclaim the Media
Rosenlaw & Einschlag
Teletruth
U.S. Public Interest Research Group
Washington Bureau for ISP Advocacy
Wyoming.com
Please contact:
Seth Johnson
New Yorkers for Fair Use
275 Fort Washington Avenue, Suite 3C
New York, NY 10032
(212) 543-4266
Full list of Committee Recipients:
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual
Property
Subcommittee on the Constitution
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law
U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection
U.S. House Committee on Science
Subcommittee on Research
Subcommittee on Environment, Technology and Standards
U.S. House Committee on Small Business
Subcommittee on Rural Enterprises, Agriculture and
Technology
U.S. House Committee on International Relations
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Intellectual Property
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property
Rights
Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer
Rights
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
Subcommittee on Science and Space
Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation and Competitiveness
Subcommittee on Trade, Tourism and Economic Development
U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on International Economic Policy Export and
Trade Promotion
cc: Representative Rick Boucher
Senator John Sununu
Senator Ron Wyden
United States Delegation to the World Intellectual Property
Organization:
Michael Keplinger, Senior Counselor, Office of Legislative
and International Affairs, US Patent and Trademark Office
Jule Sigall, Associate Register for Policy and International
Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress
Ann Chaitovitz, Attorney-Advisor, Office of International
Relations, US Patent and Trademark Office
Malla Poor, Attorney-Advisor, Office of Policy and
International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office, Library of
Congress
Attachment:
http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/wipo.xcast/xcast.whyscrutiny.htm
This statement is available online at:
http://www.nyfairuse.org/xcast/xcast.jointstatement.htm
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