WP: Weighing Webcasters' Rights to Content

[DeepModem Mom]

Weighing Webcasters' Rights to Content
By Jonathan Krim
Thursday, November 3, 2005; Page D01


Battles over illegal sharing of music online are so last summer. The hot fight now is over copying of video from television or the Internet that generally has been considered freely available to the public.

If television broadcasters and webcasters have their way in international treaty talks, they would gain new, 50-year rights to virtually any video they beam out, even if no one owns the rights to the content.

So, for example, say ABC or Yahoo offers a broadcast or webcast of a movie no longer under copyright protection, historical footage of a news event or a live feed of a breaking story -- no one could make a copy of that program and rebroadcast it to others.

The result, according to digital rights advocates, is that the viral power of the Internet to expose millions (or billions) of people to news or unprotected creative works will be in jeopardy. The seemingly instant, online cycle of people posting information, seeing it, linking to it or retransmitting it -- as happened with the amateur tsunami videos -- could be dragged into a morass of new ownership questions.

"This new layer turns every distributor into yet another owner," argues James Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology, which is fighting the treaty. When it comes to content in the public domain, Love contends, there should be no restrictions on who can use the work....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110203187.html

[shockingelk]

1. Looks like

Crooks and Liars may need to think about a legal defense fund.