The
Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a
WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to
make the PC illegal,
trash the public domain,
break copyleft and
put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another
EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the
Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (
EFF mirror,
UPD mirror), trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!