The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization has reconvened to discuss a treaty that will kill innovative Internet audio/video offerings — like podcasting, YouTube, Google Video, and Democracy Player.
Just to clarify, this treaty would create a new layer of rights for webcasters to control copies of retransmitted content regardless of the original copyright scheme (Creative Commons, public domain) the content is released under. No other country supports this provision of the treaty, so there are some backroom dealings going on to get this into the treaty in the first place, probably at the behest of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft that would not like to compete with upstart sites like Youtube. Make no mistake, this is about killing competition for the benefit of large companies, and that will harm innovation and free speech on the internet.
Hopefully the UN's own inefficiency will ensure that this treaty never gets off the ground. Would be nice though if the treaty got buried because our elected officials actually listened to us.
