Report from Broadcast Treaty meeting at USPTO

As mentioned in today's class, an inter-industry group opposed to the Broadcast Treaty attended a USPTO round-table on the US participation in the Treaty. Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn has a great report on the session:

[NAB Senior Associate General Counsel Ben Ivins] then accused those of us who think that the US delegation should not be making US laws overseas of essentially being xenophobes who are pushing the US view of broadcasting and copyright on the rest of the world. Funny, I thought the US delegation usually pushing the US view of the world in trade and WIPO negotiations.

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America to US gov't - Kill the Broadcast Treaty!

An incredibly diverse coalition of high-powered public interest groups, industry associations, and corporations have signed an open letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office rejecting the "Broadcast Treaty," a US-led UN initiative that could do untold harm to artists, tech and telecoms companies, scholars, and people with disabilities.

Under the Broadcast Treaty, fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain would be trumped by the "broadcast right," which would be owned by the broadcaster of works. If you got a copy of a work over the air or over the Web that copyright would let you use (because it was in the public domain, because it was factual, or even because the creator had granted you permission), you'd still need to seek permission from the "caster," who would get a 50-year monopoly over the re-use of copies of the works it transmitted.

The proposal to extend this to the Web could put YouTube, Google Video, and innovative podcaster services out of business, by banning or restricting the way that these companies re-use each others' materials. And if you're a podcaster accustomed to lifting other podcasters' material and pasting it into your podcasts, you'll need permission from the company that hosts the podcasts, not just permission from the creator.

The Webcasting provision has been underwritten by Yahoo and Microsoft, whose advocates at the UN work tirelessly to keep the US on-track in pushing the rest of the world to taking it on board. The rest of the world doesn't want Webcasting, but it keeps sneaking back into the treaty, over howls of protests from artists and major governments.

Now some of Yahoo and Microsoft's competitors have woken up to the fact that they're about to get their lunches eaten for them and have signed onto a letter asking the USPTO to quit handing their doom to a couple of companies.

The letter's signatories are wonderful, ranging from AT&T and Verizon to Yale, to Dell and Intel, and library associations from the medical librarians to the law librarians and more. Also on the list are TiVo, EFF, Panasonic, H-P, the US musicians' managers, and many others.

Home and personal networking. Under the current draft of the treaty, the broad scope of the proposed rights, combined with proposed additional rights regarding technological protection measures (TPMs) in connection with these rights, raises questions about whether “casters” would gain the ability to control signals in the home or personal network environment. Such control is without precedent and would interfere with the rollout of broadband and home and personal networking services and limit the development of innovative devices that provide home and personal networking functionality. Accordingly, the treaty should include a provision excluding coverage of fixations, transmissions or retransmissions across a home or personal network. Further, we should note that many of our group believe that TPM provisions are inappropriate in connection with this treaty and should be excluded from the treaty entirely.

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Mysterious Flash video DRM

A company claims to have developed an anti-copying system for Flash video, but doesn't offer any details on how it proposes to accomplish this unlikely task:

The ACP - Anti Caching Protection from Onlinelib allows webcasters to protected their Content with a DRM - Digital Rights Management System. Basic System is the VCS - Video Communication Server from Onlinelib.

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(Thanks, Jens!)

New Zealand wants a Minstry of DRM

The New Zealand government has concluded a consultation on DRM, trusted computing and government and written a set of principles that they hope governments around the world will follow. The principles describe a theoretical DRM that governments could use without threatening their own security, ongoing access to information, archiving and public privacy.

They suggest that DRM vendors should be forced to disclose all the workings of their DRMs, limit the way that their DRMs communicate with the rest of the world, work even when the Internet is down or the vendor's gone out of business, and so on.

They also call for the creation of a Ministry of DRM that keeps keys and master documents for everything the government puts under DRM, and suggests that this ministry should police all DRM use within government.

One thing that's notable by its absence is any discussion of DRM and open source. While New Zealand's official policy is to encourage the use of open source in government, the consultation (which was fed by MIcrosoft, HP and IBM) makes no mention of the disastrous impact of DRM on open source.

DRM relies on its owners not knowing how it works and not being able to change how it works. If I give you a song that can only be played on five computers, it defeats the point if you can change that to 50,000 computers. But the point of open source is that it is better for society, individuals, and competition if anyone who cares to can discover how her tools work, improve those tools, and publish her improvements.

By deciding that it will accept DRM over its threshold -- instead of using traditional proven security and open standards -- the New Zealand government is setting up a situation where New Zealanders and NZ businesses will have to license software from foreign software companies before they can do business with government.

If you're an NZ programmer and want to make software to help your neighbors work with the documents that your government publishes, getting into the DRM will require you to close your source, license secrets from foreign DRM vendors, and submit to a "compliance" system that makes sure your work meets the business-priorities of foreign companies.

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(Thanks, Steve!)

Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada?

Michael Geist examines two warring proposals for ensuring that Canadian schools' use of the Internet is lawful and concludes that both of them cause more harm than they prevent. On the one hand, Access Canada proposes to collect fees from schools for just looking at the web, a license shakedown that would treat all educational use as a copyright infringement unless you'd paid them for permission to turn on your web-browser.

A seemingly better proposal comes from CMEC, which represents Canada's education ministries: they say that Canadian copyright should be rewritten to carve out a new exception for schools' educational use of the Web.

But Geist shows that this latter proposal comes with lots of potential for harm. If schools need an exception to copyright to look at the Web, what does that say about uses of the Web in businesses, homes, libraries, home tutoring outfits, and elsewhere? Surely reading and studying published documents should be lawful for everyone, not just schools.

Another risk is that the US entertainment companies' reps in Canada will use this "generous loosening" of copyright law as the basis for a Canadian version of the DMCA, the US law that has sent researchers to jail and let the entertainment companies invent new private copyright laws that you can't violate without being sued.

Geist has been tracking this Canadian DMCA proposal with his 30 days of DRM series, an exhaustive look at the Canadian DMCA proposal and the harm it will bring down if the Tories pass it as they have promised to do.

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(Thanks, Michael!)

Movie studios vs. bloggers

On KCRW's "The Business" today (the podcast will be up soon), panelists talked about the online tug of war going on between movie studios' marketing departments and bloggers. Movie studios had started noticing that, with all the online chatter about movies for months before they came out, lots of people who might otherwise have gone to see their films were just sick of hearing about them already and stayed home on release weekend. To combat this trend, New Line clamped down on information leaks about "Snakes on a Plane," hoping to create the bulk of the buzz during the month directly preceding the film's release. They also didn't screen it for critics, except for the premiere the night before it hit theaters. (Those who saw it then gave it overwhelmingly positive reviews, according to Tom Tapp of Hollywood Wiretap.) This, of course, didn't prevent bloggers excited by the premise from writing about the film. After a precisely timed, traditional periodicals/billboards/TV ads campaign, the first weekend numbers for "Snakes on a Plane" were disappointing. Turns out the only people who went to see the film were those bloggers and their buddies. (They'll all watch it on cable and buy the DVD, too.) Now movie studios are trying to devise better ways of controlling and utilizing bloggers and their influence on the entertainment journalists who use bloggers' tips to fill their own columns. Not only do studios want/need to control what happens to their products once they're released on an unsuspecting public, but they want to use their muscle and deep pockets to control what we say and when we say it about them, too. They already do this with the press when they embargo information till a certain date (and try to limit that information to outlets that will be favorable to them). Is it possible that, one day in a near and ominous future, bloggers will be blamed for a film's failure? Will studios try to find a way to hold individuals financially accountable? That's one way this could go: a very scary way. But in light of studios' virulent attacks on filesharing, it doesn't seem improbable to me.

Congress desperate for technological expertise

Recently, the House Committee on Science heard a panel of experts who urged them to create a new in-house, non-partisan support organization to keep them abreast of sci/tech issues and the policy questions they raise. This is great news because, since the Office of Technology Assessment was unfunded in 1995, the committee has relied on a patchwork of industry, universities, scientific societies and the AAAS for expertise on sci/tech issues. (This might explain that "series of tubes" comment by Senator Ted Stevens -- poor guy.) So basically since the Internet first sparked in the public consciousness, Congress hasn't had anyone on the inside dedicated to explaining to them what the Internet actually is and what all these pesky public issues that emanate from it like the green glow of kryptonite really mean. From among those informing Congress, I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that highly paid tech-industry lobbyists are the ones most consistently knocking down doors when necessary to to get their messages heard.

Unless addressed with wisdom and foresight, these issues (e.g., DRM, P2P, identity theft, estalking and all the rest) are to the Internet as kryptonite is to Superman. This technology has already transformed the way people think about the world, communicate with others, learn, keep abreast of current affairs, entertain themselves, commit crime, find sex (even love) and so much more -- and that's just during its first dozen years in existence. The Internet, coupled with cell and satellite technology, is beginning to look like the collective unconscious of mankind. Tap into it anywhere and explore the dark recesses of your psyche, or your neighbor's. Or embody the Trickster archetype and release a worm, just to see. The Internet will keep evolving, and our lawmakers have the opportunity to guide it toward a productive future by protecting freedom of speech and supporting creativity and innovation, or they can take the blue pill and make it all about the revenue streams flowing to the right coffers. As a strategy, this will ultimately fail, but it'll be painful for everybody. That they understand they need help is the first step toward recovery. Contact the House Committee on Science and/or the Senate Committee to make sure they understand the stakes. I'm sure corporate lobbyists have done all they can to obfuscate the truth.