Proposed Treaty on TV Signals Spurs Criticism

PROPOSED TREATY ON TV SIGNALS SPURS CRITICISM
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Jim Puzzanghera]
The proposal sounds modest enough: Broadcasters want to stop international pirates from hijacking American TV signals and re-transmitting them over the Internet. But the high-tech industry and digital rights advocates see something more sinister in the fine print of a proposed international treaty being negotiated this week in Geneva. They fear it will end up restricting how people can use legally recorded shows stashed on their TiVos or computer hard drives. Pushed by U.S. and European TV networks, the treaty being considered by a World Intellectual Property Organization committee would prohibit the theft of their signals, as well as those from cable and satellite broadcasters. TV broadcasters said they were not targeting average viewers recording their favorite shows, just large-scale thieves stealing their business. "If you send our signal … to 100,000 people so it ruins our ability to market our signals, we ought to be able to prohibit that," said Ben Ivins, senior associate general counsel for the National Association of Broadcasters, which has been pressing for the treaty for several years. But in what is shaping up as the next major battle in the fight over digital content, a coalition of phone companies, information technology firms and digital rights advocates warn the proposed treaty could do much more and is working to derail it.
http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-nutreaty13sep13,1,7973906.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-business
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