In the world of the Long Tail, blogs, podcasting, and online video, you’d think copyright would be getting more flexible and diversified, right? Not if the U.S. government has its way:

Under the Broadcast Treaty, fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain would be trumped by the “broadcast right,” which would be owned by the broadcaster of works. If you got a copy of a work over the air or over the Web that copyright would let you use (because it was in the public domain, because it was factual, or even because the creator had granted you permission), you’d still need to seek permission from the “caster,” who would get a 50-year monopoly over the re-use of copies of the works it transmitted.

America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, Tuesday, September 5, 2006

For this treaty: Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Against this treaty: AT&T, Verizon, Google, TiVo, HP, Dell, Intel, and numerous librarians, musicians, writers, and even universities.

Interesting that this is a completely different lineup than for net neutrality. Funny how the big telcos don’t like it when somebody wants to legislate against them.

If an old paradigm is losing to a new one, attempting to legislate the old one seems to be a common practice these days, even though this Sarnoff’s Law broadcast treaty makes no sense in a group-forming Reed’s Law world.

-jsq