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False Positives Adventures in Technology, SciFi and Culture from Toronto

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty

It's tough to find information about the WIPO, but Cory posted on Boing Boing a great resource inculding a first time peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published. As he wrote when it started

There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.

So I'll quote from Cory's post on why is very important and very scary:
WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes
The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way,
this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror),
trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!

see copies of the transcript at either Union for the Public Domain or Electronic Frontier Foundation, or as a Local PDF I made : Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.pdf (~220 Kb compressed PDF using OpenOffice)


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