General Assembly

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently published a new draft of the proposed Broadcasting Organizations Treaty as document SCCR/47/3 in preparation for the 47th meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/47) in December 2025. The draft does not differ in its main provisions from previous drafts, and this raises questions as to whether the document fulfils the mandate given to the SCCR by previous WIPO General Assemblies. Below we provides an analysis of the chair’s draft edits. We focus on the substantive changes in SCCR 47/3 as well as on the more controversial provisions, most of which are unchanged in this draft. The central question for the Broadcasting Treaty, in line with the 2007 General Assembly Mandate, is whether there is sufficient “agreement on objectives, specific scope and object of protection” to warrant a recommendation for a diplomatic conference. (WO/GA/34/16). The 2006 WIPO General Assembly mandated that the Broadcasting Treaty be “confined to the protection of broadcasting and cablecasting organizations in the traditional sense” and “based on a signal-based approach” (WO/GA/33/10, para 107, 2006). Key issues include whether the treaty should include any exclusive rights, rather than only general obligations to prevent piracy (similar to its current Art. 10 and to the substance of the Brussels Convention Relating to the Distribution of Programme-Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite); whether it should extend to rights of fixation and to “stored programmes”; whether to enable remuneration schemes for retransmissions; and how to broaden the limitations and exceptions to ensure that broadcast rights cannot prohibit uses permitted by copyright exceptions. To download or print this analysis, see the pdf below. Analysis and commentary by section on the latest draft of the Broadcast Treaty Updated Broadcast Treaty. New text in SCCR 47/3 in green.   Comments and Suggestions 2. Definitions SCCR 47 added:  2.06 In the Draft Text, there is no definition of the term “broadcast”.  The object of protection of the Treaty is the transmission of the programme-carrying signal, which constitutes the broadcast.  The broadcast represents the output of the activity in which a broadcasting organization is engaged, namely “broadcasting”, which is already defined in item (a). Furthermore, the term “broadcast” is not employed in the Draft Text. (g) “stored programmes” means programmes, which a broadcasting organization owns or regarding which it has acquired transmission rights with the intention of including them in its linear transmission, or which have originally been transmitted in a linear transmission by a broadcasting organization, For those that want to extend protections of the treaty to streaming on the Internet, a key challenge is how to achieve this goal while limiting any protection to traditional broadcasters rather than to streaming companies such as YouTube, Spotify, etc.  The definition of a broadcasting organization applies to any organization that “takes the initiative and has the editorial responsibility for the transmission, …; the programmes of a broadcasting organization form a linear programme-flow.” “Linear program flow” means scheduled programming. Internet streaming companies often show some scheduled programming and thus could be considered covered broadcasting organizations. The definition of “stored programmes” attempts to limit application to more traditional broadcasters by requiring that such programs be owned or licensed “with the intention of including them in its linear transmission.” Most of the content from streaming companies is not intended to be included in a linear transmission.  There is a policy question about why there is a need to cover stored transmissions at all. As the definition notes, such programs are normally either owned or licensed by the broadcaster, which then would have all copyright rights to combat piracy of the programs.  Commenters have offered changes to restrict the scope of the treaty to traditional broadcasting. Hugenholtz (2023) proposes that the definition of covered broadcasts exclude transmission of stored programs on demand by covering only “simultaneous reception by the general public of a programme-carrying single, where the programmes are provided in a prescheduled and linear order.” This is similar to the Rome Convention, which defines “rebroadcasting” as “the simultaneous broadcasting by one broadcasting organisation of the broadcast of another.”  Love advises adding that the signal be “from a single source point to multiple recipient points,” which would exclude on demand point-to-point transmissions.  Article 3: Scope of Application (2) The provisions of this Treaty shall apply as well to the protection of programme-carrying signals of the broadcasting organizations used in their transmissions when providing access to the public to the stored programmes of the broadcasting organizations.… (6) Contracting Parties may, in a notification deposited with the Director General of WIPO, declare that they exclude broadcasting organizations that exclusively transmit their linear programme-carrying signals by means of computer networks from the scope of application of this Treaty.  Such notifications may be deposited at the time of ratifications, acceptance or accession, or at any time thereafter; in the last case, it shall become effective six months after it has been reposited. The treatment of webcasters has long been a controversial issue in the negotiation, with some arguing that to be limited to traditional broadcasting the treaty should exclude application to webcasts that never make use of traditional airwave-based broadcasting. Proponents of such extension point to the transition of some providers to web-only transmission.   The draft makes clear that countries may exclude webcasters through a reservation.  To limit the text to traditional broadcasting, Art. 3(2) and (6) could be deleted.  Article 6 Right of Retransmission to the Public […]  (2) Any Contracting Party that, before the entry into force of this Treaty, did not provide a right under paragraph (1) to broadcasting organizations in respect of entities that merely retransmit programme-carrying signals for the reception by the public while providing reasonable remuneration to rightholders of the programmes carried by such signals, may continue such a domestic legislative arrangement. One problem with giving broadcasters a right to prevent retransmissions to the public of their signals is that many countries require such retransmissions, for example to carry public broadcasts over cable, internet, or other forms of service that