Podcasters act now to stop anti-podcasting UN treaty!

Boing Boing writes that some organisations apparently try to enforce broadcasting/webcasting rights.

The Broadcast Treaty is an attempt to force the world’s governments to give a new right to broadcasters, a right to control the use of works they don’t own. The Broadcast Right will allow broadcasters to stop you from copying or re-using the programs they transmit, even if those programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed or composed of uncopyrightable facts.

And this should then be applied to webcasting:

The webcasting right will break podcasters‘ ability to quote and re-use each others‘ work (even CC-licensed works), and other video found on the net. It will allow podcast-hosting companies like Yahoo to tell people how they can use your podcasts, even if you want to permit retransmissions.

Given the discussions about net neutrality, DRM, etc. I guess that we will, in 10 years or so, look back at the era of the 90s and the beginning of the new millenium as an exceptional time when things were free, readily mashup-able and rather convenient. A weird era that promised freedom, but didn’t last…