Below is a cleaned up version of the transcript, from my rambling intervention for KEI on the broadcasting treaty definitions.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My comments would be initially on the definitions.It is our position that it’s more appropriate to provide protection for free services that are traditionally provided by radio and television and less appropriate for pay services,
I think you should take into consideration the possibility that a country may want to implement the treaty only for the broadcasting services which are really traditional, the services addressed by the Rome Convention, radio and television broadcasts that were free and available to the public.
The definition of broadcasting organisation could be modified to limit only to services that were available to the public for free, or at least to provide for the possibility that a country could implement the treatly only for free services.
If you have to pay for the information, and you can’t get if you don’t pay for it, that’s a different concept than a communication to the public that was addressed in the Rome Convention.
By adding a definition for free or pay services, and opening up the possibility that a government could limit the benefits to people that provide free services to the public.
There is almost no rationale for including an encrypted signal where you have to pay for the service, because then it’s just a business relationship between the person providing the service and the person receiving it.
All of these areas where people pay for cable, for example, or satellite services with the content encrypted, you lose access if you don’t pay. So it’s very different situation than an over the air free service.
That’s something the definition could provide the possibility for, to implement the treaty protection only to free services.
Secondly, quite a bit of the discussion in the informals and over the past several years has focused on sporting events. There should be a definition of live sporting broadcast, This has been the focus of a lot of the conversations about the treaty, In some cases you may want to provide more extensive protections for live broadcasts than you do other types of transmissions. From what people have said, sporting events present special challenges within the copyright system, that is not the case more generally.
If you write a general instrument in terms of protection, to accommodate the special concerns, you could end up doing something that doesn’t make any sense outside of the context of the sports broadcasts. So there may be a missing definition for sports broadcasts, in case governments want to tier or tailor the rights or protections differently for sports broadcasting than they do for other types of things.
Our preference for the definition of broadcasting organisation is to insure that the definition, and I have been looking at the definitions in the table of for alternative A and B of Article 5 from SSCR27/2REV, does not apply to just anyone who creates a web page or anybody that creates a method of distributing information. The definition is problematic in the sense that wireless technologies are now quite ubiquitous in terms of receiving Internet transmissions.
You have a wide variety of Internet originated services that are delivering information over wireless telecommunications networks.
So, have you limited the treaty to radio and television services? Is the treaty limited to broadcasting “in the traditional sense,” which is in quotes in the tables?
If you look at the evolution of the technology it doesn’t look traditional in the way things are headed, and in the negotiating room people are talking about trying to make the treaty apply to blue sky, future technologies. If you look at the broadcaster briefing documents, there is a big tension between “in the traditional sense” and what the delegates are talking about.
The delegates are talking about making he treaty inclusive, making a lot of activities qualify as broadcasting, and I think that’s quite problematic.
In terms of broadcasting transmissions the definition of a broadcast, we certainly do not think broadcast should be things that are done at the time and place of your choosing as a listener. It should not be applied to the kind of services HULU offers in the United States or a lot of these sort of on-demand service or play lists that we create.
The treaty should not not be understood to include transmissions that are at for the time and choosing of the listener. And, again, taking into account the fact that there are many services now provided directly over wireless networks to wireless devices I think it quite important. Thank you.