WIPO's "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations" [PDF] is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.
If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one record or redistribute it -- and sue anyone who does. And TV companies could use their new rights to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats.
If that wasn't bad enough, the US contingent at WIPO is pushing to have the treaty expanded to cover the Net. That means that anyone who feeds your "sound and images" through a web server would have a right to meddle with what you do with the webcast simply because they serve as the middleman between you and the creator.
John Naughton of the London Observer called the treaty "a control freak's charter." Mark Cuban, Tim O'Reilly, and 18 other Net experts called its webcasting provisions "unnecessary," and "likely to constrain, not increase, the creation of more information products for the public."
And yet, the US WIPO representatives are still pushing for it to go forward.
We don't think they are working in the best interests of the American public, nor do they have any sort of mandate to create new "rights" for middlemen to be used to restrict what ordinary Americans can do with their media. We think that the Library of Congress and the US Patent and Trademark Office should invite formal public comment on what they're doing to our networks, and Congress should hold public hearings so that the audience can have its voice heard.
Write to Congress and remind them that it's government's job to protect all of us, not just the broadcasting industry.
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.