COPYCENSE

“In September last year, I wrote about a very bad proposal being debated in the World Intellectual Property Organization. The proposal was to extend the length of an existing set of intellectual property rights for broadcasters, and even apply them to webcasting.

“Extending the rights to webcasting, despite the manifest differences between the economic structure and global reach of the two media, was a jaw-dropping move with obviously bad consequences. We should be focusing on rules about conduct, not rights over content.

“This proposal was so bad, so empirically threadbare, so unbalanced, that I had cherished a faint hope that the members of WIPO would abandon it. At least, I hoped there might be a comparative study of the nations that had previously adopted the protection and those that had not, to see if there was any need for such a change? What was I thinking!!?”

James Boyle. Constitutional Circumvention. FT.com. June 13, 2006.

Related Stories & Documents:

• James Boyle. More Rights Are Wrong For Webcasters. FT.com. Sept. 26, 2005.

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