Joint Statement Signatures Sought to Save the Internet

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Fri, 03 Mar 2006 12:28:51 -0500

Joint Statement Signatures Sought to Save the Internet

 

 

 

 

 

Hello folks,

 

Please review the important joint statement below, related to the

WIPO Broadcaster's Treaty, and consider adding your signature if

you are an American citizen. Also make sure those you know who

should sign are also given the opportunity.

 

Andy Oram has written a good letter to the US Delegation to WIPO

on the subject:

>

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2006/01/13/the-problem-with-webcasting.html\

?page=2

 

CPTech Links on the Treaty:

> http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/index.html#Coments

Electronic Frontier Foundation Links:

> http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/

IP Justice Links:

> http://www.ipjustice.org/WIPO/broadcasters.shtml

Union for the Public Domain Links:

> http://www.public-domain.org/?q=node/47

 

The Latest Draft of the Treaty:

> http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/sccr12.2rev2.doc

 

A survey of relevant links:

>

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/wipo_and_the_war_against_the_i.html

 

If you choose to sign, please send your name along with an

affiliation or appropriate short phrase to attach to your name

for identification purposes, to seth.p.johnson.

If your organization endorses the statement, please indicate that

separately, so your organization will be listed under that

header.

 

Thank you for consideration.

 

 

Seth Johnson

Corresponding Secretary

New Yorkers for Fair Use

 

 

Joint Statement to Congress:

 

 

Dear (Relevant Congressional Committees) (cc the WIPO

Delegation):

 

Negotiations are currently underway at the World Intellectual

Property Organization (WIPO) to develop a treaty giving

broadcasters power to suppress currently lawful communications.

The United States delegation is also advocating similar rights

for " webcasters " through which the authors of new works

communicate them to the public.

 

Some provisions of the proposed " Treaty on the Protection of

Broadcasting Organizations " would merely update and standardize

existing legal norms, but several proposals would require

Congress to enact sweeping new laws that give private parties

control over information, communication, and even copyrighted

works of others, whenever they have broadcast or " webcast " the

work.

 

The novel policy areas addressed by this treaty go beyond

ordinary treaty-making that seeks worldwide adherence to U.S.

policy. Instead, this initiative invades Congress' prerogative to

develop and establish national policy. Indeed, even as Congress

is debating how best to protect network neutrality, treaty

negotiators are debating how to eliminate it.

 

The threat to personal liberties presented by this treaty is too

grave to allow these new policy initiatives be handed over to an

unelected delegation to negotiate with foreign countries, leaving

Congress with the sole option whether to acquiesce. When dealing

with policies that are related to copyright and communications,

Congress's assigned powers and responsibility under Article I,

Section 8 of the Constitution become particularly important. We

urge two important steps. First, the new proposed regulations

should be published in the Federal Register, with an invitation

to the public to comment. Second, the appropriate House and

Senate committees should hold hearings to more fully explore the

impact of these novel legal restrictions on commerce, freedom of

speech, copyright holders, network neutrality, and communications

policy.

 

Americans currently enjoy substantial freedoms with respect to

broadcast and webcast communications. Under the proposed treaty,

the existing options available to commercial enterprises and

entrepreneurs as well as the general public to communicate news,

information and entertainment would be limited by a new private

gatekeeper who adds nothing of value to the content.

Communications policies currently under discussion at the FCC

would be impacted. Individuals and small businesses would be

limited in their freedom of speech. Copyright owners would find

their freedom to license their works limited by whether the work

had been broadcast or webcast. The principle of network

neutrality, already the subject of congressional hearings, would

be all but destroyed.

 

As able as the staff of the United States Patent and Trademark

Office and the Library of Congress may be, it was never intended

that they alone should stake out the United States national

policy to be promoted before an unelected international body in

entirely new areas abridging civil liberties. Congress should be

the first to establish America's national policies in this new

area so that our WIPO delegation will have sufficient guidance to

achieve legitimate objectives without impairing Constitutional

principles such as freedom of speech and assembly, without

impairing the value of copyrights, and without granting to

private parties arbitrary power to suppress existing freedoms or

burden new technologies.

 

We cannot afford for Congress to wait for the Senate to be

presented with a fully formed treaty calling for the enacting of

domestic law at odds with fundamental American liberties foreign

to American and international legal norms, and that would bring

to a close many of the benefits of widespread personal computing

and the end-to-end connectivity brought by the Internet. We ask

Congress to use its authority now to shape these important

communications policies impacting constitutionally based

copyright laws and First Amendment liberties.

 

Signed,

 

(Affiliations for individual signers are for identification

only. Endorsing organizations are listed separately.)

 

 

William Abernathy, Independent Technical Editor

Scottie D. Arnett, President, Info-Ed, Inc.

Jonathan Askin, Pulver.com

John Bachir, Ibiblio.org

Tom Barger, DMusic.com

Fred Benenson, FreeCulture.org

Daniel Berninger, VON Coalition

Eric Blossom, GNU Radio

Joshua Breitbart, Media Tank

Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

Michael Calabrese, Vice President, New America Foundation

Dave A. Chakrabarti, Community Technologist, CTCNet Chicago

Steven Cherry, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum

Steven Clift, Publicus.Net

Roland J. Cole, J.D., Ph.D., Executive Director, Software

Patent Institute

Gordon Cook, Editor, Publisher and Owner since 1992 of the

COOK Report on Internet Protocol

Walt Crawford, Editor/Publisher, Cites & Insights

Cynthia H. de Lorenzi, Washington Bureau for ISP Advocacy

Cory Doctorow, Author, journalist, Fulbright Chair, EFF

Fellow

Marshall Eubanks, CEO, AmericaFree.tv

Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Media Access Project

Miles R. Fidelman, President, The Center for Civic Networking

Richard Forno (bio: http://www.infowarrior.org/rick.html)

Laura N. Gasaway, Professor of Law, University of North

Carolina

Paul Gherman, University Librarian, Vanderbilt University

Shubha Ghosh, Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University

Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University

Fred R. Goldstein, Ionary Consulting

Robin Gross, IP Justice

Michael Gurstein, New Jersey Institute for Technology

Jon Hall, President, Linux International

Chuck Hamaker, Atkins Library, University of North Carolina -

Charlotte

Charles M. Hannum, consultant, founder of The NetBSD Project

Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group

David R Hughes, CEO, Old Colorado City Communications, 1993

EFF Pioneer Award

Paul Hyland, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

David S. Isenberg, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, isen.com, LLC

Seth Johnson, New Yorkers for Fair Use

Paul Jones, School of Information and Library Science,

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Peter D. Junger, Professor of Law Emeritus, Case Western

Reserve University

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive

Jerry Kang, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

Dennis S. Karjala, Jack E. Brown Professor of Law, Arizona

State University

Dan Krimm, Independent Musician

Michael J. Kurtz, Astronomer and Computer Scientist, Harvard-

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Michael Maranda, President, Association For Community

Networking

Kevin Marks, mediAgora

Anthony McCann, www.beyondthecommons.com

Sascha Meinrath, Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network,

Free Press

Edmund Mierzwinski, Consumer Program Director, U.S. Public

Interest Research Group

Lee N. Miller, Ph.D., Editor Emeritus, Ecological Society of

America

John Mitchell, InteractionLaw

Tom Moritz, Chief, Knowledge Managment, Getty Research

Institute

Andrew Odlyzko, University of Minnesota

Ken Olthoff, Advisory Board, EFF Austin

Andy Oram, Editor, O'Reilly Media

Bruce Perens (bio at http://perens.com/Bio.html)

Ian Peter, Senior Partner, Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd

Malla Pollack, Law Professor, American Justice School of Law

Jeff Pulver, Pulver.com

Tom Raftery, PodLeaders.com

David P. Reed, contributor to original Internet Protocol

design

Jerome H. Reichman, Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law

Lawrence Rosen, Rosenlaw & Einschlag; Stanford University

Lecturer in Law

Bruce Schneier, security technologist and CTO, Counterpane

David J. Smith, Specialist of Distributed Content

Distribution and Protocols, Michigan State University

Michael E. Smith, LXNY

Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation

Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. Student, UNC Chapel Hill

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge

Jay Sulzberger, New Yorkers for Fair Use

Aaron Swartz, infogami

Stephen H. Unger, Professor, Computer Science Department,

Columbia University

Eric F. Van de Velde, Ph.D., Director, Library Information

Technology, California Institute of Technology

Tom Vogt, independent computer security researcher

David Weinberger, Harvard Berkman Center

Frannie Wellings, Free Press

Adam Werbach, President, Ironweed Films

Stephen Wolff, igewolff.net

Brett Wynkoop, Wynn Data Ltd.

John Young, Cryptome.org

 

 

Endorsing Organizations:

 

Association For Community Networking (AFCN)

The Center for Civic Networking

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Contact Communications

The COOK Report on Internet Protocol

Cryptome.org

Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network

Dandin Group

FreeCulture.org

Free Press

Free Software Foundation

Illinois Community Technology Coalition

Internet Archive

Ionary Consulting

IP Justice

isen.com, LLC

mediAgora

New Yorkers for Fair Use

Old Colorado City Communications

Podleaders.com

Pulver.com

Rosenlaw & Einschlag

U.S. Public Interest Research Group

Washington Bureau for ISP Advocacy

Wyoming.com

 

--

 

[separate one-page attachment]

 

WHY PUBLIC SCRUTINY OF THE PROPOSED BROADCASTER TREATY IS NEEDED

 

If Congress were to hold public hearings, or if the US delegation

to WIPO were to publish the current proposal for public review

and comment, myriad voices from various segments of society could

come forward to show that the proposed Broadcaster's Treaty:

 

* Is written to look like existing copyright treaties, but it

is not based on the constitutional requirements for

copyright protection, such as originality, and in fact is

antagonistic to copyrights

 

* Is promoted as a way of standardizing existing signal

protection, but in fact extends well beyond signal

protection by giving broadcasters and webcasters a monopoly,

for 50 years, over the content created by others the moment

it is broadcast or transmitted over the Internet

 

* Gives broadcasters greater rights than producers of original

works

 

* Accords exclusive rights to non-authors in direct violation

of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution

 

* Attacks the principle of network neutrality which serves as

the basis by which the Internet has fostered a profound

expansion in human capacities and innovation

 

* Grants privileges that extend beyond broadcast signals to

actually give broadcasters control over works conveyed

within a broadcast -- including copyrighted and public

domain works

 

* Blocks fair use and other copyright provisions that enable

the public to make use of and benefit from published

information

 

* Chills freedom of _expression by extending unwarranted

controls over broadcast publication

 

* Benefits broadcasters at the expense of the web, the public

and future innovation

 

* Creates a de facto tax on copyrights, freedom of speech,

communications and technological progress, all for the

benefit of broadcasters and webcasters who have added

nothing to deserve such a windfall.

 

 

 

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