[h3]UN cooking podcast-killing treaty [/h3] The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization has reconvened to discuss a treaty that will kill innovative Internet audio/video offerings -- like podcasting, YouTube, Google Video, and Democracy Player -- in order to protect the business models of a few entrenched broadcasters. This is the Broadcast Treaty, and the process -- never pretty -- got uglier than ever today. The Chairman of this treaty committee has colluded with the US to expand this treaty to cover the Web, and to be sure that it contains a clause that will give DRM even more mandatory protection than it enjoys today. As the committee reconvened today, the Chairman revealed that he'd gone even further in giving the US what it wants, at the expense of the will of the rest of the world, particularly developing nations like Brazil. [/p]Virtually the entire world has opposed the extension of the broadcast treaty to the Web. Giving people who host Web-based audio/video a 50-year monopoly over the use of the copies they send out is just plain nuts. The Web is full of Creative Commons licensed material, public domain material, and other material that either no one owns, or has been expressly licensed for free re-distribution. The US has carried water for Microsoft and Yahoo, both of whom see a webcasting provision as an easy way of keeping competition from overtaking their video offerings. [a href="vny!://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21/us_copyright_head_wo.html"]Even the head of the US Copyright Office agrees that the world hates this idea.[/a] [/p] Previously, the Chairman had resolved the problem by putting webcasting into an optional part of the treaty (a small improvement, since the US would certainly require its trading partners to adopt it as part of its treaties). But with this meeting, the Chair has put it back into the core of the treaty -- a core that virtually every country in the room has already rejected! [/p]To make matters worse, the Chair has also moved the objections to the treaty's DRM requirement into an optional section of the treaty, to be discussed separately. Many developing nations, most notably Brazil and India, previously rejected the idea that the treaty would extend even more legal protection to DRM, which has been a total failure at enriching artists, and which will turn their domestic entertainment industry into merely suppliers for US DRM companies like Microsoft and Apple. [/p] When EFF brought a [a href="vny!://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/19/tech_companies_tell_.html"]letter signed by 20 leading technology firms[/a] opposing this treaty, they let the copies be repeatedly [a href="vny!://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002117.php"]stolen and tossed in the garbage cans in the toilets[/a]. They threatened to throw out bloggers who published the contents of the negotiations. [/p]These twin provisions -- Webcasting and DRM -- are deadly for podcasters. Podcasting services rely on the ability to mirror, aggregate, index, process, convert and host podcasts, and hundreds of thousands of podcasts are licensed to explicitly permit this kind of work. But once you need permission from hosting companies like Yahoo before you can index, and once it's illegal to break copy-restriction formats to analyze the podcasts they contain, it's game over. [/p] The forest of hundreds of startups gets burned to the ground, and only a few old trees like Yahoo and Microsoft are left standing. [/p] This is the same UN agency that created the DMCA and EUCD, the laws used to jail crypto researchers and shut out tech companies that want to make interoperable technology, that let the Church of Scientology and others censor web-pages by claiming that they infringe on copyright. [/p] They're the most deadly enemies the Internet has. [/p] They claim they're acting on your behalf. [a href="vny!://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php"]Link[/a]
