World Copyright Treaty Coming soon 202
ebresie writes: "According to an article in Info World,
the World Intellectual Property Organization indicates that the WIPO Copyright Treaty is scheduled to go into effect in March of 2002. The treaty "is designed to protect the rights of composers, artists, writers, and others whose work is distributed over the Internet or other digital media." It also makes reference of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty which "specifically protects the digital-media rights of producers and performers of sound recordings"." This is not a "new" treaty; rather it's the old one, which says much the same thing as the DMCA and was used to justify the passage of the DMCA. Now the same provisions will be in effect across many countries.
Who Are These Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who are these guys? And who elected/appointed them They Who Shall Decide Intellectual Property Policy For The Rest Of Us?
Seriously, who are they? Who gets selected to be a member, and why?
Schwab
Small fry (Score:5, Insightful)
There'll always be data havens, never fear.
Re:GPL - for other works (Score:2, Insightful)
WIPO Copyright Treaty == US Companies Own You (Score:3, Insightful)
With this, they'll be able to do it no matter where you are. Sadly, the only place where these people might be safe now is Communist China, though 25 years from now that might not be so bad considering the direction we're taking in the West.
No deprivation of right to free speech... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Copyrights are good (Score:3, Insightful)
If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything.
Yeah, Mozart would never have composed The Magic Flute without copyright protection. Oh, wait...
Well, I Know Britney 'Jailbait' Spears wouldn't have done quite as well without Copyright law. Um...
Re:I fail to see... (Score:2, Insightful)
You picked an interesting example. Consider this. The essense of jazz is improvisation, of course. A cornerstone improvisation technique is quoting material from other music. Listen to any solo by a great contemporary or past improviser -- Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, or one of today's young lions. You'll hear snatches of familiar tunes here and there, intermixed with new ideas. Great improvisors nearly always use a mix of both techniques. This type of borrowing is as old as music. "Theme and variations" is a similar cornerstone of mainstream composed music through the centuries.
Under current copyright law, as implemented through the courts, such borrowing of themes is now ILLEGAL without permission of the composer (which is frequently not available, or prohibitively expensive). Therefore, today's jazz musicians are frequently stopped during recording sessions and told to stop quoting material from other sources. "Stop playing it the way you want to and play it the way the lawyers tell you to." The Estate of Cole Porter is particularly notorious for litigation in this regard. (Note that parody is specifically permitted under the law, so although a beautiful apropos quote from "Night and Day" is illegal, a silly parody of the same song is not.)
So this is an example of how unending copyright protection over works written early in the last century has stifled a vital and beautiful art form of today. Does the composer deserve some kind of protection over the composed works? Clearly. But should this extend to what, for me, is an essential type of fair use? I don't think so.
I'm sure others will provide more substantive examples; but this is one that really pisses me off.
Re:Copyrights are good (Score:3, Insightful)
Where do you get off? I find your sweeping generalizations to be both offensively cynical and incorrect! I mean, do you actually know any artists? Meet me, I'm an artist. I mostly subsist on ramen noodles and mac and cheese. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be rich. Please don't tell me I don't exist: my ego might not handle it. (BTW: this is also how a lot of hacker artists lives, e.g. RMS)
It seems the only people who advocate getting rid of intellectual property protections are those who have never created anything and only want to use someone else's work for their own profit.
Ahem... "True invention is a myth. All art is theft -- without reference and past things nothing can be created." -- Malcolm Garrett (artist, designer, look it up)
The problem with the late trend in copyright/IP law is that it cuts out fair use, and makes the creative process one that is fraught with legality and opportunities to litigate. This is not a Good Thing. Litigation is one of the most wasteful, culture-destroying thigns in the world. As Shakespeare said, first thing to we do, we kill all the lawyers. Step one towards utopia, man.
Re:I fail to see... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly the difference, and it's a big one. I think it was Ben Franklin who said that an idea is set apart from a physical commodity in that you are no way impoverished when you give it away. If I give away my carrots, I have no carrots. If I give away an idea, I still have just as much access to and use of that idea as I had before it was shared. Hence the popular "Information wants to be free" meme.
I tend to be mistrustful of copyright in the vein of Jefferson; historically, copyright was implicitly joined to the idea of physical embodiments and copies, which allowed for a reasonably balanced approach. But when objects of copyright are trivially disembodied, and "to copy" is something that gets done internally 10 times over in the basic handling of a copyrighted work to begin with (server copies it off of disk into buffer cache; copies it from buffer cache to network stack; from network stack to ethernet card; copied over a series of store-and-forward routers; copied from client network stack to client application; copied and manipulated within client application to decode; copied to kernel buffer; copied from kernel buffer to audio card), we need to look for a new abstraction instead of "copying" on which to hang IP law.
Re:Copyrights are good (Score:2, Insightful)
They protect the creator in profiting from the art , literature or music they create. If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything. Sure some people will do it, but not on a scale like we have today.
This is one argument for copyrights that's always seemed a little skewed to me. How does getting residual profit from something you've already created encourage you to create more. I mean in programming for instance, the reason most commercial code is written is because the programmer does not get residual income, but rather only gets paid while actively programming. I mean would you continue to work if your company said, 'we'll continue paying you 80k a year for this one program you've written forever." I think the scheme that will lead to people producing more is one in which they are only paid while actively creating.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
I'm glad you settled that issue for us. If the majority of artist create with the goal of being famous and wealthy than they labor under a serious misapprehension since the vast majority will never be either. The fact is the vast majority of art is never rewarded in any financial fashion whatsoever. So if only profitable art were created there would be far less of it.
Intellectual property protections are actually good because they force people to create something better than what exists today. Patents are a perfect example. There are thousands of companies researching new technology to create products that are better and cheaper than what we have today. Without patent protection we would have to rely on the government and universities for research. And since they aren't for profit we would only get things some geek thought up in a lab and would probably have no practical use in the real world.
Kind of sly to mix patents in with copyright since many people have very different feelings on the two things. Muddying the issue only makes your argument look weaker, especially with smearing university researchers. The problem with all your speculation is that it's of the form, if the world were exactly the same except no patents... but the world would be vastly different without a concept of intellectual property. My problem with IP is that it introduces a prior restraint upon me. If I think up a great idea without any outside influences, I can be legally restrained from using just because someone else thought of it first.
Copyrights are good in theory (Score:1, Insightful)
Over-generalization, and in the not-too-distant future, this may be completely false. Copyrights work under authority of law. Law, however, is not absolute or omnipresent or any of those nice things we would like it to be. Over the past five years, the info-anarchists and cypherpunks have made their foot-hold, and I can only see this growing. Witness Napster and Gnutella and Morpheus and Freenet (speaking socially, not technically) and then imagine what information exchange will be like 5 or 10 or 100 or 1000 years from now. Napster wasn't popular because its tens (hundreds?) of thousands of pirating users are stupid: copyright as an institution, as it exists right now, is unpopular. And I see it remaining unpopular. Copyright laws were created when they only affected about 0.1% of the population (those who owned presses), and even that's generous I think. WIPO and even the US Congress can make all the copyright laws they like, but they are all subject to the authority of law, which is quickly decreasing. The populace will eventually have its way, and legal restrictions on information will become completely moot.
Over-generalization. Even if we change this to what you really mean "almost everyone dreams of being rich and famous", this isn't really a great point. While most people would like to be rich and famous, I doubt very many people sincerely believe that they will ever deserve to be rich and famous. Most people will probably believe something like "I would like to be able to raise a family, have a good home, with some pleasures here and there, and everything else is gravy." It's very possible for artists (and even a lot of them, maybe more than we have rigth now!) to meet that goal without copyright law existing in its current form.
I know I'm anonymous, which ruins my credibility somewhat (though I'm not sure why. Why does posting under an anonymous pseudonym somehow give me credibility?), but I'm not just some stupid whiner. I've created a few lesser software packages. Freshmeat (and my FTP logs) report that I've got a fair number of downloads on my projects (totalling about 2000 over the past couple years), some of which resulted in feedback (meaning people did actually try them out). I've sent a few patches to free software projects. I've written some music. Not record-company-contract material, but enough that a couple dozen people or so have thought it be "kind of cool".
I have the coding skills that I could easily end up as a code monkey once I get my CS degree, writing in-house (or maybe contracted) programs for an above-average salary. I'm not going to do that, though. Once I graduate, I'm going to try to get service-based work, or maybe start my own service-based business, one that doesn't depend on draconian copyright law.
WIPO is not democratic; it does hold a lot of logal power. But I think, in the end, the populace will have its say, one way or the other. Some will turn to info-anarchy (a la Napster). Some will respect, but reject, copyright law (a la the FSF and myself). Some will turn to a hybrid of the two (a la the Freenet developers). It'll all come out in the wash :)
What utter nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do people come up with this crap from? The WTO and the WIPO have member states as their members. For the purpose of the meetings, individual member states appoint representatives to represent them. True, each member state uses its own mechanism to appoint the representatives - which also depends on the level of the conference. Some countries send their ministers (secretaries of state) for the relevant areas while other countries send other higher or lower ranking officials.
The WTO and WIPO are (very influiential) non-governmental organizations. That's the problem at the moment: they're really accountable to no one other then their fat-cat corporate sponsors.
Nonsense. These are international organizations just like the UN. Countries are members - they send people who represent their interests to the forums for discussion. Ultimately it is the government of the country that is responsible for the decisions they agree to and in a democracy the government is accountable to the people - in other forms of government whatever checks or balances (or lack thereof) is who the respective governments are acountable to.
I really wish some idiots would read what they are protesting before protesting it. The majority of the WTO protesters were clueless idiots like the parent poster who have no idea what the WTO was about.
Re:I fail to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I buy a physical artifact, I can make a copy of my own, or take some good ideas from it and make a derivitive object. I can even do this if I only see it through the window of a store, and don't buy it. Now, this doesn't apply to all objects (ie carrots), and trademark and patent laws may prevent me from selling my object, but in its creation I haven't infringed anyone's rights.
Just throwing a wrench in the analogy.
Re:What utter nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right! It's a big evil conspiracy! Posting links to the US Trade Representatives [ustr.gov] websites will immediately bring the secret police to your door. Deep links to the USTR WTO website [ustr.gov] are expressly prohibited! In fact everything is so hidden that if you search for "US representative WTO" on google [google.com] you get nothing at all!
You know what else is a corporate conspiracy? The CIA! There are no senate meetings or congress approval to appoint the individual agents in the CIA. It's gotto be a corporate conspiracy!
Or there is the logical conclusion that the secretary for trade is the one responsible for the decisions of who represents the US and the secretary is appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate and Congress - but that theory is so boring.
I have to take issue again. Were you there among the "majority of WTO protesters" or did you rely on (hostile) mainstream media coverage to make your assessment?
I live in Seattle. I have heard the stupid comments first hand from idiots trying to prove to me the WTO was evil and from the same morons in other forums like Slashdot. Clueless uninformed opinions. Vague hints of nebulous corporate conspiracies. You guys should really read some newspapers from other countries to get a clue what organizations like the WTO are. Too many idiots are journalists in this country.
Amnesia (Score:3, Insightful)