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It's the Distribution, Stupid!
Posted by Ernest Miller on Wednesday, August 28 @ 10:53:57 EDT Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Consensus at Lawyerpoint, EFF's primo blog on broadcast DRM, points out that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will soon be considering for a second time a proposal to give broadcasters "fixation rights" (Europeans push WIPO Broadcast Treaty to create "fixation rights"). Read last year's press release (Proposal for a new WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organisations) and the proposal [PDF]. The proposal would basically force signatories to mandate the use of DRM for all broadcasts and would eliminate the right to, for example, use a Digial Media Recorder like TiVo, or timeshift.

What gets me about this proposal is how clear its objective is. The beneficiaries of these "rights" are not copyright holders, but broadcasters. Isn't WIPO an intellectual property organization? I've always said that the content copyright wars are not about the rights of creators, but rather, are over the control of distribution networks. This is the most obvious example I've seen recently.

Of course, it also worries me that if these entirely new "rights" are accepted, it won't be very long before they are extended to every other means of electronic distribution.

 
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