One of the 21st Century’s greatest battlegrounds (apart from water, energy, and enviromentalism) will be the battle over ideas; or atleast the battle over who ownes those ideas. As Western societies move towards ‘knowledge based economies’ or economies where the manufacture and consumption of ‘knowledge and culture’ become the driving force of our economies (ie. education, software, media, digital entertainment etc.) then the political tensions over who owns these ideas will become even more important. One UN organisation that attempts to set IP standards on a global scale is called WIPO. However, any organisation on the global scale must content with numerous contested and conflicting interests.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialised agency of the United Nations. It is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.
WIPO was established by the WIPO Convention in 1967 with a mandate from its Member States to promote the protection of IP throughout the world through cooperation among states and in collaboration with other international organizations. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.
See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s comments on WIPO’s proposed broadcast treaty.
The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) “Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations” is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.
If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters 50 years of copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one record or redistribute it—and sue anyone who does. And TV companies could use their new rights to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats (link)
Also this:
The United States delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been one of the strongest supporters of efforts to create a new intellectual property right for broadcasters and cablecasters through a new WIPO treaty. If adopted, the treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters and potentially webcasting companies 50 years of copyright-like rights over anything they transmit, including public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works. It would also give broadcasters legal protection to use technology to lock down content, giving them control over how you use broadcasts received by your television, radio and possibly personal computer and control over how those devices are designed and built.
The new Broadcasting Treaty is likely to restrict your access to knowledge and culture, and it lets broadcasters make decisions that should be left in the hands of creators and the public (link).
