EDRI signs the Joint Statement for SCCR 1st Special Session

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights’ (SCCR) Special Session
is taking place right now at Geneva. The meeting (and another in June 2007)
aims to fix the proposed Broadcast Treaty so that it could be ratified by
the end of this year in a diplomatic conference. If no consensus is found
on the content, there will be no conference and – most likely – no treaty at
all.

EDRI is participating to the meetings together with other NGOs (EFF, CPTech,
IP-justice etc) as an observer. The organizations have prepared together a
joint statement “, which is also endorsed by a large number of technology
companies and which main message is that nobody has been able to argue why a
treaty is needed at all.

However, in the spirit of constructive engagement if the treaty is to
be moved forward in any form, the statement provides with least
minimum requirements, at both the principle and the practical
language level, notwithstanding more comprehensive specific proposals
by some of the signatories. Of major importance is the first of these
requirements:

“We believe that the current rights-based approach of the treaty must
be abandoned entirely. We understand that some parties to these
negotiations have equated ‘signal protection’ with granting ‘rights
to prohibit’ certain uses of broadcasts. We believe that rights in
any form are not signal protection, or signal-based protection, and
we cannot support their inclusion in any potential new Instrument in
connection with Broadcasting.”

EDRI is also particularly concerned with the possibility that the
draft treaty proposal allows for control over Internet
retransmissions of broadcasts and cablecasts. As demonstrated at
previous occasions, the power of such statements lay in the coalition
of diverse industry and NGOs that sign up, even though not optimal
from each signatory, including EDRI, point of view. It remains that
the core message EDRI wants to convey with its endorsement is that
there should be no additional layer of rights for broadcasting
organizations and that the statement opposes the treaty applications
to the Internet, in case the text continues to take a rights-based
approach rather than a signal theft or signal protection approach.

The meeting will end at Friday and a more detailed report will be
found from the next EDRI-gram.

Joint Statement of Certain Civil Society, Private Sector and Rightsholders
Representatives for the First Special Session of the SCCR
http://www.edri.org/docs/joint_statement_sccr1.pdf

Wipo Casting Treaty Blog
http://www.cptech.org/blogs/wipocastingtreaty/

Meeting Documents – SCCR 1st Special Session
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeting_id=12043

EDRI-gram: The broadcast treaty stalled by WIPO General Assembly
(11.10.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.19/broadcast

(Thanks to Ville Oksanen – EDRI-member Electronic Frontier Finland )