Deep disparities between delegations remained after a second day ...

on Copyright and Related Rights focussed Tuesday on the draft preamble, said Ville Oksanen, co-chairman of the European Digital Rights working group on intellectual property (IP). Cultural diversity, access to knowledge and competition law’s role remain stumbling blocks, he said. The U.S. will not accept a treaty including provisions on them as substantive clauses, but Brazil, Chile and others feel the opposite, and the European Union has yet to state a position, Oksanen said. The “conflict is quite profound,” and it will be interesting to see how Liedes resolves it, particularly with only two days of talks left, he said. Some nations want language on cultural diversity, public interest issues and competition in the draft (dubbed the “non-paper"), said an official from a developing country. Rights conferred, exclusive rights over retransmission and deferred transmission by any means to the public of fixed broadcasts benefit from strict technical protection measures and rights management provisions, the official said: “All this together makes for a very powerful treaty, unlike what is being claimed.” Even worse, the official said, the treaty covers works lacking substantive creativity, apart from investing to transmit. You can criminalize the act of stealing a signal without recognizing broadcast entities’ exclusive rights of a commercial nature, he said. It is unclear whether consensus will emerge sufficiently to warrant a diplomatic conference later this year, but the chairman of one non-governmental organization has said he remains optimistic. A treaty has “a good chance, much better than Arnold Schwarzenegger being elected Miss France this year,” Mihaly Ficsor, Central and Eastern European Copyright Alliance chairman and former WIPO assistant general director, told an April Fordham University property conference. Success hinges on the international IP atmosphere, complicating accord on new substantive terms, a difference from 1996, when the WIPO Internet treaties were devised, he told us. Ficsor sees a link between the Doha Round of trade talks and events at WIPO, he said. If World Trade Organization talks end with an appropriate compromise, “it would certainly improve the conditions for the necessary treaty-making activities in WIPO,” he said.