 WIPO Poobah Uses T-word
posted by tbyfield on Thursday December 04 2003, @06:53AM
Kamil Idris, director-general of WIPO -- an organization to which ICANN's prostrations have made a mockery of Jon Postel's principle of deference to existing, neutral authoritative sources -- has hopped on the "terrorist" bandwagon. "Piracy," he says, "is like terrorism today and it exists everywhere and it is a very dangerous phenomenon." He went on: "Combating piracy is not an easy task, but it requires efforts of governments and international organisations and of course the NGO (non-governmental organisation) community." Examples of the "combat" he cited reportedly included copyright on songs. Can domain names be far off?
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Me, I'm inclined to laugh at the prospect. Domain names? Terrorist?! Right! But we've seen the nascent tendency of IPR *crats to "link" -- both in rhetoric and in reality -- unauthorized duplication of CDs with Terror. And we've certainly seen ample evidence of IPR *crats' transcendant love of FUD (for decades now: "Home taping is killing the music industry").
And, in the wake of 9/11, we saw how eagerly ICANN embraced Terror as a pretext to take its problem of public accountability out behind the barn and shoot it -- then replace it with a Stepford mandate of "security and stability" (two terms that, with extortionate sublety, are all but oozing the implications of their negation).
The point isn't what I think is likely, or even possible; rather, it's the ludicrous extremes that IPR *crats will go to in order to pimp their pet agencies. Yes, bogus pharmaceuticals are a Very Bad Thing. No, unauthorized duplication of CDs isn't the Same Thing. Yes, WIPO's chief has lumped them together. Just how likely is it that, if WIPO persists with this vaguery, ICANN will resist?
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< Why it's time to rein in ICANN
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