In our capacity as accredited observers of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), we are attending the 46th session of the Committee, which is currently taking place in Geneva (April 7-11, 2025).
The following statement contains COMMUNIA’s position regarding the current draft treaty on the protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Agenda Item 4):
Dear Delegates,
I am speaking on behalf of COMMUNIA, a Brussels-based civil society organization advocating for progressive copyright reform, and my main message for you today is: “Don’t cut the signal!”
Don’t cut access to broadcast signals by libraries, archives and museums. Don’t cut access to broadcast signals by researchers, educators and other creators.
We want to support you in your efforts to prevent the theft of broadcast signals, but this cannot be done at the expense of the Public Domain and usage rights.
While we welcome the deletion of the three-step-test in Article 11(3), we note that none of the exceptions in Article 11 are mandatory. In countries following a rights-based approach, this would mean that broadcasters could be granted more exclusive rights over the content of the signal than creators have over that same content. We thus urge you to include in the text at least the same mandatory exceptions that already exist, at the international level, for copyrighted works (quotations, news of the days, and providing access for the visually impaired).
Similarly, while we welcome the reinstatement of Article 12(3), which clarifies that anti-circumvention protection does not prevent users from benefiting from limitations and exceptions, we note that users of Public Domain programmes should be treated similarly, to ensure that technical protection measures are not used to prevent the use of content that is unprotected or no longer protected by copyright. We thus urge you to extend this flexibility to public domain content.
Thank you.
A joint publication by the Access to Knowledge Coalition launched yesterday further illustrates our argument (download as a PDF file).
