Thursday, June 21, 2007

NPR & PBS Defend Fair Use

As a documentary filmmaker, I'm a big advocate of fair use. Fair use is that provision in copyright law that allows people to use a fair portion of a copyrighted work in an essay, critique, news story or commentary. It's why people are able to make a documentary like Outfoxed and not have to clear the clips from Fox News that are being called into question (and Fox, notorious for coming after anyone who disagrees with them, could do nothing about it).

Is it any wonder then that the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) is lobbying the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for what they call broadcast rights? A group that consists of CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Direct TV... and Fox Broadcasting.

Broadcast rights would belong to media companies that broadcast other people's copyrighted works. They aren't subject to the same fair use limits as copyright. That means if a filmmaker, news organization or blogger invokes fair use by recording a broadcast for criticism or parody, they still need to separately clear broadcast rights.

This is to combat piracy, says the NABA.

Yet another way to control the freedom of information, says I.

But wait! There are heroes in this battle. NPR and PBA published this response to the notion of broadcast rights.

"National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service do not support a Diplomatic Conference to adopt a treaty based on the April 20, 2007 non-paper because they do not believe the treaty provides adequate protection for the fair use of broadcast and cablecast matter for newsgathering and other purposes. Bell ExpressVu does not support a Diplomatic Conference because it believes the proposed exclusive retransmission right exceeds what is necessary to prevent signal piracy or protect investment and does not contain a reservation that would permit a signatory to limit or not apply the application of the retransmission right."
Yet despite NABA by-laws which require a super-majority consensus before presenting policy statements to WIPO, the other members went ahead and did it anyway... thumbing their nose at NPR and PBS.

For more on this issue, visit Boing-Boing and Public Knowledge. At least there's someone watching our freedom.

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