Comments on Day One of the 2nd Special Session of the WIPO SCCR on a Draft Broadcasting Treaty.
So far the negotiations on a draft for a WIPO Broadcast Treaty seem to be stuck making it more and more unlikely that a consensus will be reached till the session will end tomorrow morning. But according to the WIPO General Assembly’s decision from 2006 such a consensus on the substantive provisions of the proposed treaty have to be reached before a Diplomatic Conference will be announced.
Long delays and informal sessions are again characterizing the negotiations at the second special session of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). Monday morning the delay was caused by the African Group which didn’t stop discussions until 12 a.m. as Thiru from KEI was reporting.
I was entering the session around 4 p.m. When the Chair was asking for General Comments on the new non-paper – which is the new name for documents introduced by the Chair to the SCCR.
This Chair has been in his position for the whole negotiation process, lasting now nearly 10 years, and is taking a very active role in pushing the draft treaty forward to a diplomatic conference. Yesterday he found very clear words. Being asked for an example to give an illustration on how a broadcaster deals with a copyright free content, e.g. a football game he answered that in many countries one hardly can find any sports broadcast that is not in some way copyrighted, not copyrighted materials are very rare. In his words the aim of the treaty is to protect the scheduling as such which is what broadcasters are asking for.
This statement was surprising for me because in all sessions I attended so far the proponents of the treaty – as seems to be the Chair - mostly were stressing the argument that improved rights are needed because of the ever increasing piracy of the signals. That the Chair in an open session clearly says that Broadcasters simply want more rights, that this should be justified by their scheduling and that this is the aim of the treaty was not heard by me before and gave me the idea to prepare a more general IP Justice intervention statement for the morning session of Tuesday.
Day one ended with no further surprises in time at 6 p.m.
~ Posted by Petra Buhr, IP Justice Global Policy Fellow