2006-06-20 at 1:44pm
Emigrate! Do it today!
Heh. I am serious though - Britain pisses me off so much.
What’s good for the goose
The copyright extremists at WIPO are meeting tommorow in Barcelona to hash out a way to destroy podcasting. Of course, that’s now how they put it. They just waffle endlessly.
What the plans do is put a severe restriction on the ability of copyright owners to control what is done with their work.
Let us say I produced a piece of work for no commercial purpose - say, a CC Attribution-ShareAlike podcast - and a commercial broadcaster chooses to break the terms of my license by broadcasting it without attribution or without sharing their derivative work.
This is a treaty to allow major broadcasters to break copyright and take away any possible sanctions for usurping the intellectual property rights of individual and small fry owners - exactly the people who need the protection of the law the most! - in order to quash the threat they believe (rightly) podcasting and online media is likely to be.
This is a landgrab of the worst order. We need to find out who represents us at WIPO and go through eggs at them if this ridiculous treaty passes. I’m not kidding. I’m drafting a letter to my MP. You should too.
