Webcasting and YOUR Digital Rights

Webcasting and YOUR Digital Rights

Reading Webcasting Woes [1], a recent post in Ken Camp's [2] Digital Common Sense [3], I followed a link to a fascinating article written by Andy Oram [4]
from O'Reilly. Ken asks how many podcasters have concerns about
webcasting. Excellent question. The link is to Andy Oram's
article, The Problem With Webcasting [5]. From the very first paragraph of that article:

There's a new restriction on content waiting in
the wings--a "webcaster's right" that allows websites to control the
dissemination of content they put up. With this new privilege, they'll
be able to prevent retransmission even if the copyright on that content
is owned by somebody else--even, in fact, if that content was in the
public domain.

This is more than protection, a la
Creative Commons, copyrighting, or trademarking. This goes to who owns
the access, and how; in some cases being persuasively sold (by
big huge greedy companies known as Baby Bells, or Regional Bell
Operating Companies) as the very distribution channel itself.
Distribution channel meaning access, the delivery of the net itself to
your machine. Think of delivery to you as a form of casting, webcasting, so to speak.

What is webcasting, and what will be the effects
of this restriction? Nobody knows--except, one supposes, the large web
portals pursuing the webcaster's right. I will try to ferret out what
they want to do in the course of this article.

And for that paragraph alone as a tease, you should read Andy Oram's entire article [5]. Thanks to Ken Camp -- without having seen the link in his blog [3], I might have missed this excellent dsicussion [5] altogether.