Escucha! o tu voz te volverá loco. (Proverbio Chino)

Importantes negociaciones de DRM aplicado a la web

Posted: Mayo 2nd, 2006 | Author: Kamen Nedev | Filed under: [*] de suscriptores->, [artesonoro/radio], copyleft | No Comments »

El conocido bloguero Cory Doctorow escribe sobre los preocupantes avances en las negociaciones de la WIPO acerca de las formas de extender la Gestión de Derechos de Propiedad Digitales (DRM) al entorno de la red. Más concretamente, se trata de extender esta legislación al campo del net- y podcasting, afectando los incipientes medios en línea, y también realzando la desigualdad entre el Primer Mundo y los países en desarrollo.

Las discusiones tienen lugar en EE. UU., pero tratan la legislación internacional. Con la presente reforma de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual en España, esto nos dibuja un panorama un tanto, por usar una muletilla de la que les gusta a ellos, “adversa”…

Cuando las barbas de tu vecino veas cortar…

Del artículo, Boing Boing: UN cooking podcast-killing treaty:

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

UN cooking podcast-killing treaty

The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization has reconvened to
discuss a treaty to kill innovative Internet audio/video offerings –
like podcasting, YouTube, Google Video, and Democracy Player — in
order to protect the business models of a few entrenched broadcasters.
This is the Broadcast Treaty, and the process — never pretty — got
uglier than ever today.

The Chairman of this treaty committee has colluded
with the US to bring this treaty to the Web, and to be sure that it
contains a clause that will give DRM even more mandatory protection
than it enjoys today. As the committee reconvened today, the Chairman
revealed that he’d gone even further in giving the US what it wants, at
the expense of the will of the rest of the world, particularly
developing nations like Brazil.

Virtually the entire world has opposed the extension
of the broadcast treaty to the Web. Giving people who host Web-based
audio/video a 50-year monopoly over the use of the copies they send out
is just plain nuts. The Web is full of Creative Commons licensed
material, public domain material, and other material that either no one
owns, or has been expressly licensed for free re-distribution. The US
has carried water for Microsoft and Yahoo, both of whom see a
webcasting provision as an easy way of keeping competition from
overtaking their video offerings.

Even the head of the US Copyright Office agrees that the world hates this idea.

Previously, the Chairman had resolved the problem by putting webcasting
into an optional part of the treaty (a small improvement, since the US
would certainly require its trading partners to adopt it as part of its
treaties). But with this meeting, the Chair has put it back into the
core of the treaty — a core that virtually every country in the room
has already rejected!

To make matters worse, the Chair has also moved the objections
to the treaty’s DRM requirement into an optional section of the treaty,
to be discussed separately. Many developing nations, most notably
Brazil and India, previously rejected the idea that the treaty would
extend even more legal protection to DRM, which has been a total
failure at enriching artists, and which will turn their domestic
entertainment industry into merely suppliers for US DRM companies like
Microsoft and Apple.

When EFF brought a letter signed by 20 leading technology firms opposing this treaty, they let the copies be repeatedly stolen and tossed in the garbage cans in the toilets. They threatened to throw out bloggers who published the contents of the negotiations.

These twin provisions — Webcasting and DRM — are deadly for
podcasters. Podcasting services rely on the ability to mirror,
aggregate, index, process, convert and host podcasts, and hundreds of
thousands of podcasts are licensed to explicitly permit this kind of
work. But once you need permission from hosting companies like Yahoo
before you can index, and once it’s illegal to break copy-restriction
formats to analyze the podcasts they contain, it’s game over.

The forest of hundreds of startups gets burned to the ground, and only
a few old trees like Yahoo and Microsoft are left standing.

This is the same UN agency that created the DMCA and EUCD, the laws
used to jail crypto researchers and shut out tech companies that want
to make interoperable technology, that let the Church of Scientology
and others censor web-pages by claiming that they infringe on
copyright.

They’re the most deadly enemies the Internet has.

They claim they’re acting on your behalf.