Redrafted Broadcast Treaty Threatens Podcasters

This post by Jen at Britcaster, sent by Glyn Wintle at http://openrightsgroup.org regarding DRM and the newly redrafted Broadcast Treaty:

"The Broadcast Treaty allows people who transmit content to assert a 50-year monopoly called a Broadcast Right over its copying, retransmission, and so on, even if there's no copyright, or a license from the copyright owner letting you copy the content. The "fair use" exceptions for the Broadcast Right are totally different from the rights for copyright. DRM used to protect Broadcast Rights is illegal to break. That means that if your podcast is hosted by someone other than you, your Creative Commons license is invalid -- they can prohibit your listeners from copying, transcoding, or passing on your podcast. It means that if you download audio from the net -- including other podcasts - and include excerpts in your own podcast, either relying on fair dealing or Creative Commons licenses, you're no longer legally in the clear.

If you operate a service that aggregates, indexes, translates, subtitles, or makes other transformative use of podcasts, you're no longer in the clear. If your podcast relies on search-engines to index it so others can find it, you're screwed.

Glyn"