Copyright scholar James Boyle has a brilliant Financial Times column on the WIPO broadcasting/webcasting treaty that threatens to gum up the Internet with a new layer of "middleman" rights, for the nonsensical reason that it will create "parity" between broadcasters and webcasters:
Much of what is broadcast over the airwaves is copyrighted -- the broadcaster licenses the film or song from a copyright holder and then plays it to you at home. What you probably do not know is that nearly 50 years ago broadcasters in some countries got an additional right, layered on top of the copyright. Even if the material being broadcast was in the public domain, or the copyright holder had no objection to redistribution, the broadcaster was given a legal right to prevent it -- a 20-year period of exclusivity. The ostensible reason was to encourage broadcasters to invest in new networks. The US did not sign this treaty. Has the US broadcast industry stagnated, crippled by the possibility that their signals will be pirated? Hardly. Copyright works well and no additional right has proved necessary. Has WIPO commissioned empirical studies to see if the right was necessary, comparing those nations that adopted it with those that did not? Of course not. This is intellectual property policy: we do not need facts. We can create monopolies on faith.
But now a new diplomatic conference is being convened to reopen the issue. Doubtless the goal is to abolish this right? ...No.
In the funhouse world that is intellectual property policy, WIPO is considering a proposal to expand the length of the right by 30 years and a US-backed initiative to apply it to webcasts as well. After all, we know that the internet is growing so slowly. Clearly what is needed is an entirely new legal monopoly, on top of copyright, so that there are even more middlemen, even deeper thickets of rights.
Government delegates are meeting this week at the  (WIPO) general assembly in Geneva to discuss the .  The meeting will determine how developing countries must implement existing controversial intellectual property rights laws including , , and . They will also consider the disputed proposal for a global .

The Broadcastings/Webcasting Treaty proposal, pushed by traditional broadcast organizations, and lobbyists for a handful of Internet publishers, including  Yahoo, is being pushed hardest by the United States government, which ironically, has never considered such legislation domestically.  The treaty would create a new layer of intellectual monopoly rights for broadcasters, potentially including 'webcasters'.  Broadcasters would then be able to claim rights over material they broadcast–even material that was in the  or licensed under creative commons or  licenses.

Many developing countries including Brazil, South Africa, India, Iran, Chile, and Venezuela are asking for time to evaluate and study the proposals, and opposition to the treaty has been registered by numerous  and public interest advocates.  Fearing a repeat of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), when US copyright law was made more strict to conform to WIPO standards, a coalition of U.S. NGOs is currently circulating a sign on letter calling for public hearings on the implications of the Broadcaster Treaty.

In a recent Financial Times article Professor James Boyle (Law, Duke University)  raised objections to the Broadcasting/Webcasting Treaty, saying "intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary, or that they will help rather than hurt".  He elaborated that such laws are made "as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups," and that concerns for "public interest in competition, access, free speech, and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat."  Professor Boyle fears that "communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules" with harmful effects.