WIPO Logjam on Broadcasters’ Rights May Be Broken by Setting Work Aside
STANFORD, Calif. -- The “idea of a moratorium” on work toward a treaty to increase intellectual property protection of broadcasters is gaining momentum, said Richard Owens, director of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s copyright law division. The work “quite frankly has been languishing” on the agenda of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright “for quite a few years,” he said Friday at a Stanford Law School conference. There are many questions about the nature of the effort, not least why broadcasters’ protections should be expanded, Owens said. It’s difficult to get such a point off the agenda because of the organization’s procedures, he said. “Progress” may be made on the matter in the “next six to eight months,” Owens said.
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There’s a good deal of support for an agreement on protecting audio-visual works, in contrast, Owens said. The committee developed a work plan this month, he said, and he expressed hope for a diplomatic conference within two years. The work plan “makes limitations and exceptions” to copyright a legitimate discussion topic and raises their profile, said Pamela Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at the University of California. She encouraged WIPO to look into whether additional limits and exceptions should be created to increase “balance” in the law and “restore legitimacy to copyright.”
A voluntary “stakeholder platform” is making progress toward allowing people with impaired sight access to protected copies mostly of text-based content and could become a model for increasing the availability of copyrighted material more broadly, Owens said. The work started early in 2009 among publishers, technology companies, collecting societies and advocates for disabled people, he said. Based on standards development by the DAISY Consortium and Onyx, the effort has “taken off quite well,” mainly because e-books have taken off, Owens said. They're working on creating “trusted intermediaries who could serve as repositories” of accessible works and deliver copies “to eligible beneficiaries,” he said.
Now there’s “a way forward to develop compatible products, with enormous cost benefit,” Owens said. It’s been possible to create versions of works accessible to those with impaired sight, but national copyright laws have restricted their use to individual countries, he said. The framework has been designed to work with “whatever legal platform is slotted in” later by international agreement, Owens said. “It’s soft law, but it could become hard law."
Owens conceded under criticism that the members of national delegations to WIPO who know “the difference between a trademark and a house plant” are still around. Unlike when he started with the organization in 1991, they're “not allowed to talk,” because diplomatic politics have supplanted subject expertise, Owens said. “Geneva is a fact-free zone in a lot of negotiations,” he said. But the pendulum is swinging back, Owens said. “It’s not going to be easy for delegates to sit there and not know what we're talking about.”
Scott Martin, Paramount Pictures executive vice president of intellectual property, had complained that many national delegations’ “sophistication is extremely low” and “many of the member states are driven by an external agenda.” WIPO’s professional staffers, on the other hand, are “highly sophisticated and understand these issues,” he said.