By CASBAA Chief Policy Officer, John Medeiros
“The ability of multinational piracy syndicates to grab broadcast streams and distribute them globally with impunity means that developingcountry broadcasters are robbed of actual and potential markets around the world.”
Take the smartphone out of your pocket, and look it over. Imagine that the rules for making and using such devices today were the same as those in effect 50 years ago. But wait…..that’s not possible. Fifty years ago, nobody had mobile phones! The first handheld public-subscriber telephones were launched in the early 1970s. The first commercial communications satellite was launched in 1962, with direct broadcasting of television from satellites to homes following in the late 1980s. And in
the 1960s, the Internet was not even a dream.
So when the current international treaty governing the intellectual property (IP) aspects of broadcast programming, the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations, was agreed in 1961, no one could foresee the evolution of the global broadcasting environment – or the many ways in which broadcast programming could be grabbed and misused without the broadcaster’s consent. The Rome Convention set the international baseline for broadcasters’ IP with reference to a world of analog, closed-border, black-and-white broadcasting. That world is long gone, and the treaty protections for broadcasting organizations are in dire need of updating.
Asian broadcasters, like others around the world, believe this need is becoming ever-more urgent as the ways in which Asian broadcast signals are hijacked and sent flashing around the globe – polluting many markets and damaging the interests of broadcasters, creative industries and governments – continue to multiply. Asia is enjoying a huge boom in television consumption, as more and more people are connected to an increasing number of networks and consuming more programming. Broadcast streams are the foundation of that growth, but broadcasters who finance, generate and aggregate those streams are forced to stand by helplessly as others relay their broadcasts – live or deferred, by many different technical means – without their consent and without paying for that use.
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