A coalition of European podcasting organizations has written an open letter to WIPO to be sent to its surprise meeting on the Broadcasting Treaty next week in Barcelona. WIPO is the UN Agency responsible for the treaty that created the DMCA and the EUCD, two terrible copyright laws that seriously threaten the Internet in the name of saving the entertainment industry from keeping up with technology. Now they’ve got podcasting and other forms of webcasting in their rights, as a part of an ugly, drawn-out attempt to create a “Broadcasting Treaty” that will give copyright-like rights to broadcasters, letting them, and not creators, control the destiny of creative works.
The Barcelona meeting is an attempt to ram through the treaty by shifting the discussion out of Geneva, where all the public interest groups that oppose it are accustomed to showing up. Instead, the meeting is being held on short notice, with a bill of speakers consisting exclusively of representatives of organizations that support the treaty. Particularly disturbing is the number of latinamerican broadcasters who have been invited, presumably to discredit the representatives of progressive latinamerican countries like Brazil and Chile, who have been opposing the treaty.
They’ve snuck podcasting and webcasting back onto the agenda, even after agreeing to take it off at the last major treaty meeting in Geneva, and now the podcasters have woken up to the fact that they’re about to get a WIPO special from the forces that created the DMCA.
Further, the extension of the Broadcast Treaty to include Podcasting does not take into account the many forms of the new medium of podcasting which do not correspond to broadcast models. We uphold our right to be different from broadcasting and therefore subject to legislation which takes these differences into account.
We, podcast creators, producers and supporters of the global podcasting community, earnestly request that WIPO respect, acknowledge and include the following in any revision of the Broadcast Treaty:
– Broadcaster copyright cannot overrule podcast copyright or other license
– Podcasting is not broadcasting and the two must not be conflated (forced together)
– The wishes of the creator regarding their rights in their work must be respected
– Creative Commons licenses, GPL licenses, “free forever” licenses (in whatever form) are legitimate and must be upheld in perpetuity.