E sccr/21/2 Original: English date: August , 2010 Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Twenty First Session Geneva, November to 12, 2010

iii. Stakeholders Affected by the Proposed Treaty

26 The proposed treaty has implications for a large number of stakeholders, including the 184 WIPO Member States and hundreds of organizations recognized by the World Intellectual Property Organization with permanent observer status, such as international non governmental organizations, international intergovernmental organizations, and national non governmental organizations. Some stakeholders primarily represent national interests; some represent organizational and enterprise interests; others represent individual or broader social interests. Although the proposed treaty deals with signal protection rather than copyrighted works themselves, stakeholder stances regarding signal protection are often shaped by their interests in the dissemination of content because content is embedded in signals.

27 Stakeholders have varying interests that sometimes diverge from and converge with each other. In order to focus on the fundamental interests of stakeholder groups and the ways the proposed treaty will affect them, we have divided stakeholders into seven broad categories: authors and performers, production firms, rights owners and licensers, broadcasters (terrestrial and satellite) and cable and satellite system operators, audiences/users/consumers, states/governments, and society. This allows functional identification of the divergence of interests among the stakeholder groups and provides the ability to highlight distinctive interests.

28 It is recognized, however, that individuals and organizations may perform activities that pertain to more than one category of stakeholder interest, and that there is therefore sometimes divergence of interests among members of the same groups. Thus, although the stakeholder groups below are separated into discrete categories, one must bear in mind that individuals and firms may have interests that cross over the categories and that the distinctions are not completely clear or mutually exclusive.

29 Examples of this include an ‘author’ who maintains some of her or his rights but has passed on management of some of the rights to a collective rights organization. A broadcaster may also have interests as a producer and as a holder of rights to original content or rights purchased from external sources. At times there may be tensions between roles played by these cross-over activities, but there is a shared common interest in intellectual property measures to achieve optimal protections for creations and the systems that underpin them and provide the ability to benefit from them.

30 Stakeholders vary widely in economic terms, with some holding greater bargaining power and receiving the larger portion of industry receipts. This occurs because there is, relatively, a highly competitive supply of creative works and labor from authors and performers, but a limited number of production and distribution companies in broadcasting and cablecasting. Similarly there is more competition among production companies, but far less competition among broadcasting and cablecasting systems due to structural, economic, technical, and regulatory conditions limiting the number of broadcaster and cablecasters and cable and satellite systems. Although contemporary telecommunications are reducing the monopolistic control over production and broadcasting distribution activities that existed in the twentieth century, greater bargaining power still remains with broadcasters and cablecasters, although it is being somewhat offset by the growth of large content rights holders and licensers and the rise of computer network platforms for distribution.

31 In discussing stakeholders, we do not assert any preferential positions, but attempt to explicate as clearly as possible their fundamental interests and concerns relative to copyright protections and the proposed treaty.