The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Good afternoon, everyone. We're setting up for the WIPO Open Forum session, for those who are interested in staying for that. Thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, we should be ready to go for the WIPO Open Forum session in the next few minutes.
>> So, ladies and gentlemen, since understandably the vast majority of potential speakers in attendance decided to go for lunch and we're not so many, can you get closer so we have a more easy exchange of views, and we are about to start. And sorry for the delay.
>> VICTOR OWADE: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the WIPO Open Forum session. Sorry for the delay, if we could all get seated. And, please, you're welcome to take the seats closer to us. Okay. Welcome. Good afternoon, and a very warm welcome to you all. WIPO is pleased to be organizing this Open Forum session that will look at two interesting topics this afternoon. One topic is a Creative Commons Open IGO license and the other is what WIPO is doing in the field of software development, in particular in relation to the video game industry. My name is Victor Owade, and I work in WIPO's External Relations Division. I will be moderating this division, and my job will be simple, to make sure our panelists keep to their allotted time and that you make your way to the wonderful Brazilian buffet that's waiting for you after this session.
So quickly by way of background, WIPO has been actively participating in the IGF over the years. Like other stakeholders, we have invested both time and resources to make a meaningful contribution to these meetings, which are rich and insightful in their discussions. We have been doing this primarily by organizing workshops that look at the intersection between the role of intellectual property and InternetGovernance public policy issues.
And over the years, we've come to see that this intersection is quite broad and covers a wide range of topics such as the role of IP in facilitating access to information, to facilitating access to local content production, to facilitating access to digital culture, and to facilitating an open access to the Internet, just to name a few of those broad intersections.
And the ultimate goal of our engagement, of course, is to help ensure that there is a balanced discussion that takes place on these issues and to raise awareness of the role played by IP in these discussions and as well to promote WIPO initiatives and activities that are relevant to the IGF community.
So with that brief backdrop, I would like to introduce our speakers for this session. They include my colleague, Paolo Lanteri, who is in the middle, and he should be familiar to many of you. Paolo works in our corporate law division, and Paolo will have five minutes to speak about WIPO's roles and activities in these two areas. After that, I'll introduce the other two panelists.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Thank you, Victor, and thanks for coming despite the unfortunate timing. We will try to have actually a quite easy and lean session. We'll tackle two topics and will have ample time for question and debate. WIPO, as you may be aware, is engaging several initiatives that are relevant to the IGF debate, not to just recognition the activity, the global infrastructure, the capacity-building and awareness-raising project that we are running around the world, and only we deem the corporate separate we could talk today using the space to discuss about the new normative developments, such as, for instance, the Marrakesh Treaty, the enabling access to printed material to the blind and the visually impaired, and the work of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights that is currently discussing a possible instrument on limitation exceptions for the benefit of libraries and archives.
And so, we can be discussing about collecting management and importance of many other things, but we decided to focus on two specific issues that in our views are often left aside, and they're particularly relevant to the discussion currently taking place at the IGF.
The first one relates to the old set of information and material that WIPO and all other international organizations produce and make available on a daily basis, and generally speaking, we know that international organizations are aligned with the idea of sharing information and resources because they are public interest institution, and these in a practical way must be achieved through licensing in terms of uses of our web pages.
So we -- a few years ago we found ourself with a situation that no one really knew what can be done with our material, and that was -- the situation was applicable to many other web pages and material created from other international organizations, so we created a working group, together with more than 15 other international organizations, to look at a possible solution to this licensing environment, how to deal, how to distribute our content.
Creative Commons, as we know, is to clarify rights to users in advance and it is also to guarantee the opportunity and recognitionattribution is granted, and it was soon identified as a suitable option for international organization material; however, the -- some problems arrived at that time because the solution could have been very simple, just use a Creative Commons license, as it was, like many other people around the globe are doing for us, strange animals, international organizations. It was not that simple. There were at least two main -- two main concerns.
One is that international organizations, due to their statutes, do not submit to national legislation, and the other concern was that we do not submit to national court because of our immunities, and we prefer alternative resolution practice.
Of course, the Creative Commons license refers to national and international organizations in many ported versions, and it was not something that could be used by us straight away -- straight as it was.
During two years we have been negotiating a specific license for the use of international organizations, and it resulted in something like this. People around our community asked whether we became cool because we engaged with Creative Commons, and the result of this two-year negotiation is actually a license that is called International Governmental Organization, CC 3.0. It's a specific suit for our constituency, the UN family, and other international organizations.
Our concern have been -- for people in the room familiar with the license -- have been reflected in the intermediate part of the license, letter F and H, where we refer to the international principle of law and international treaties rather than national legislations, and to letter H, which is the mediation followed by arbitration clause. That enabled UN family to start using the Creative Commons license, and this is already the case for WHO, UNESCO, the European special agencies, and many other organizations. I must say WIPO is currently drafting its policies, so our terms of users on the web page are already in line with what will come our policy, but they don't have the Creative Commons logo. But we already have some publications such as the Global Innovation that is licensed through Creative Commons.
I want to finish with one problem, and I'm not sure in the room there is someone that can help us. One initial problem that we face is that we have all these pictures, video, and other material, and we wanted to share it on YouTube and Flickrs, but they don't give the option to select the WIPO license, so we have to step back and wait and start the negotiations with them to include that option in our platform. So we have here one of the major expert of Creative Commons, one of the promoters, and he was engaged in the project, and I would like to ask him an initial question that is about sharing with us the main benefits and lessons learned from your practical experience in using and promoting the license. And I think we should have introduced you before, but Victor will do it right now. Sorry.
>> VICTOR OWADE: This is an interactive session, so if anyone feels they have any pressing questions, don't feel afraid to interrupt us or ask a question, just raise your hand and we'll get to you.
And our second speaker is Mr. Ronaldo Lemos to my left, to your right. It should also be known to quite a few of you, he's a professor at the state -- a professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University Law School and Creative Commons project lead. Ronaldo will take 15 minutes to speak about the Creative Commons initiative that promotes greater open access policies.
>> RONALDO LEMOS: Right. Thank you, Victor, thank you, Paolo. It's actually a privilege to be here joining the session speaking about Creative Commons. I probably have been doing that for the past, say, 15 years maybe, 14 years, involved in intellectual property, and a little less involved with Creative Commons that was launched in Brazil actually in 2004.
It's great that I see all the project leads here in the room, so very nice to see (Inaudible), Professor Sergio Bronco as well that has been involved in Creative Commons in Brazil from the beginning, and it's interesting because, first of all, I'd like to congratulate WIPO on taking up this conversation and actually leading it to a successful conclusion.
So working with Creative Commons in Brazil, Brazil was the third country in the world to actually launch the licenses. That happened after the United States, of course, where the licenses have been created, after Japan, in which Joi Ito, who is now the director of the MITMedia Lab, was the project lead in Japan at the time, and they were launched there, and then Finland, and then after that, the licenses have been launched in Brazil.
The only difference between those launches is that in Japan and Finland, the average attendance for the launch ceremony was about 50 people, and in Brazil we had, like, 4,500 people in the room when the licenses were launched in 2004.
So we had the -- from the very beginning the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture at the time headed by Minister Gilberto Gil, who is a well-known musician who works with Warner, has been working with Warner for a few decades now, and he was also the ministry at the time and is a well-known musician and cultural thought leader in Brazil, and I would say even beyond Brazil.
So from the very beginning, Minister Gil thought that the Creative Commons' policies and the Creative Commons' licenses should become not only an important thing from the perspective of his career as a musician but also something that was important as a governmental policy to make sure that impact was created, that information was disseminated in a more -- in ways that are more compatible with the digital technology, the Internet, and the possibilities of actually remixing and re-creating engaging with that content, not only from the perspective of a consumer but also as a -- the perspective from a producer of content, so basically engaging with materials that have been licensed through Creative Commons.
From that time in 2004 onwards, we have had in Brazil a lot of interesting experiences in the adoption of the licenses, and Creative Commons has become a sort of a high-profile project in Brazil, something that you can read about it often in the papers, on TV, people know about it, and one of the reasons for that is that Creative Commons actually helps solving a problem, not only of Brazil but from quite a few countries, which is the fact that the exceptions and limitations to copyright, for instance, in Brazil are very limited, so they are very specific, they're very narrow, and they even include a certain amount of uncertainty in the way that they should be interpreted.
So using Creative Commons' licenses, of course, it's a voluntary decision, and it allowed both governments, Civil Society, educational efforts, musicians, creators in general, writers, to actually give very clear and legally binding message to anyone that was interested in using those works under the regime of some rights reserved, which are the idea and the model of the Creative Commons license.
So very much because of that, a lot of creators that were interested in sharing their work in a more open way saw that Creative Commons was a viable alternative, an alternative that was legally binding, very clear, easy to use, and as quite a few friends that also are involved in the Creative Commons cause say, it has become almost like a standard feature of the way that we proceed with licensing rights online, so we have standards for quite a few things, and Creative Commons have become probably the most important standard in how you communicate rights online to the point that it has been adopted by YouTube, by Flickr and quite a few other organizations as well as a standard.
So the IGO's licenses, it comes to a very important time, because as I mentioned, we have had quite a few experiences with governments using the CC license in order to provide legal access, binding access to the materials that are produced by governments.
But what do you do if you are an intergovernmental organization that is not subject to any specific jurisdiction and have to deal with the dissemination of content throughout a large number of jurisdictions and you want to make sure that your information, that your materials are spread over as much as possible, and often you want to make sure that people can engage with those materials from a transformative perspective and actually re-create those materials, remix those materials, integrate those materials with other works, so there was no easy solution for that.
So there is no wonder that WIPO took two years to actually do that. Just to give you a sense, in Brazil, it took us one year and a half to actually port the original version of the licenses from English into Portuguese because it's not simply a matter of translating those licenses but actually porting those licenses into the jurisdiction in which the license had to be applied, and in that process, we involved all the copyright associations in Brazil, we involved a number of lawyers, of governmental offices, so on, so I think two years was actually pretty fast, Paolo, so congratulations for the work for that.
And as Paolo has mentioned, now we have a suite of licenses that are ready for IGOs, so if you are an IGO, like the World Bank, the UN system that have been adopting those licenses, now you already have a standard for licensing your creations or materials in a very clear way that is applicable over a very broad and large number of jurisdictions, making sure that you will not have to face uncertainties having to interpret exceptions and limitations and each country having to deal with the impact of licensing in each and every national copyright law that is applied to where your constituencies might be.
So as Paolo has mentioned, this suite of licenses, they also incorporate the flexibilities and the standards that are applicable to all of the Creative Commons' licenses, so attribution is always required, so if you are an IGO, you will get credit for your work because this is mandatory in all of the IGO versions that have been created.
But on top of that, you can have a significant set of choices, whether you want to make your materials allowed for commercial use or not. You can decide that and pick the appropriate license for that. You can decide whether you allow other people to actually remix or transform the materials that you have produced. You can also decide whether those transformations should also be licensed under the same Creative Commons' license, basically continuing the process of openness and making sure that transformations that happen with those materials are also open.
So this is important because the IGO license are basically benefiting from all the experience that has been built in more than a decade of the use of the Creative Commons' licenses, and now it's a very clear standard, one that will cut a lot of transaction costs because I think this is a very significant issue regarding copyright licensing everywhere today, and for IGOs, now they're finally part and beneficiaries of those standards that have been implemented by the Creative Commons' licenses.
I will conclude here, Paolo, because I think we might get some contributions and insights from the audience as well. I'm sure many of you are experts in the field as well and would be great to hear your thoughts and perceptions on this suite of licenses, so thank you very much. Thank you.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Thank you very much, Ronaldo. I think this shows that the raising the awareness of -- of Creative Commons is very important because, in fact, contrary to what some people say in public debate, Creative Commons are not an alternative to copyright, just a way of exercising the rights granted by copyright law, and in fact, they are based and they function well because they use the faculties allowed by the -- by the law, and they are also a beautiful example of how you can find practical solution using the flexibility of the system through private ordering initiatives without need to sign new treaties or modify the law.
So I think it's time to open the floor for questions, remarks of any kind. Sorry. Please. If you could just present yourself.
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: My name is Pranesh Prakash. I work at the Centre for Internet & Society. One of the things I'm a little bit concerned about is a treaty that is currently being negotiated at WIPO, and I realize that you're not a country negotiator, so I can't direct this, you know, at the countries that are pushing for this treaty, but which is -- which is on broadcasting rights, and there's a great push to include web costing as well, and transmission of -- of, you know, what web costing is itself is an open question, whether it includes any kind of live streaming online, what about non-live streaming, and what I'd like to point out is regardless of what license it is under, this is a new right that would be created, so essentially you could be licensing what you create under a Creative Commons' license, and yet, depending on how, you know, the -- this right is -- this new right's created, YouTube might have a -- or whatever else, it's unclear who the authority -- who the broadcasting equivalent online is, okay, will have a right to prevent retransmission of that, and online things don't work the same way as they do offline. For instance, YouTube actually provides an embedding facility. It wants more people to -- and you want more people to view the video, so you want people to be able to embed what's on YouTube on their own websites, et cetera.
So my simple question is this: How does all this discussion of Creative Commons, which works very well online included, gel with discussion of having rights like webcasting, separate right for webcasting, which doesn't translate well online from offline?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: We'll leave the technical part on the webcasting to our speaker. I think you would already expect what kind of answer I can give. There is a -- I mean, our agenda is driven by member states, and we can be discussing, I think, a few days on the negotiation on the treaties that have been on the agenda since 2006. It should raise a question to member states, but I think it's important to see that, for instance, in a project like the IGO license falls within the scope of activity that WIPO as an organization can lead and undertake in order to achieve its own objective or spreading information, so I see your point, but I think there are two different games. One is about managing the resources that we have, and the other one is providing a forum for negotiation with member states.
>> RONALDO LEMOS: Very good. Pranesh, thank you for your question. This is an important one. This has been going for a long time myself. I have been participating in meetings at WIPO, and this is an important concern because if you think about the idea of a commons and how a commons is originated, so for instance, we have some legal commons, like the public domain, we have the commons that emerges out of exceptions and limitations, we have the commons that is created through licensing, so like Creative Commons and the GPL get new licenses and so on.
So the concern about the broadcast treaty is that it should not encumber those commons any further in the sense that it might be a problem on -- it depends on the way it's going to be negotiated and eventually approved in a way that it might create layers of rights on top of materials that have been under a commons regime, either because they are in the public domain, either they are because a Creative Commons, or because they are under a fair use regime, so that is a concern, as you can see, not only for content that is being licensed through Creative Commons, but also concern regarding the accessibility to the public domain, and we have, like, here Professor Sergio Branco is one of the most important specialists on the public domain in Brazil has published a book called the "Public Domain," and certainly this is a concern, not to create something that can become sort of an impediment to the access of works either licensed over Creative Commons or the public domain just because they have been transmitted and, therefore, receiving another layer of rights. So this is my personal view, it's my concern, and I think the treaties are still under negotiation, so we have to see how it's going to be played out.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Thank you. Any other question, comment? No. It doesn't seem so. Okay. Brief one.
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: Just flagging one set of concern, given that the WSIS+10 review is currently happening, one thing given that many people in this room are people who are concerned about and are informed about intellectual property rights, about concepts of the public domain which find mentioned in the development agenda at WIPO, that one thing that is currently missing from the -- from the WSIS+10 outcome -- draft outcome document, which is quite prominent in previous statements, such as the Geneva Declaration on Internet principles from 2003 in the WSIS process, is a recognition of the importance of the public domain, a recognition of the importance of open standards of alternative IP mechanisms such as -- the Creative Commons isn't probably mentioned there, but free software, et cetera, do, so that perhaps is something that people in this room could -- could push their own countries to put onto the current text. And I'm sorry if that's not very germane to the WIPO Open Forum, I'm not sure whether it is or not, but I thought it's something I could contribute.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: I think it can fit within the discussion because as an organization, you may be -- I'm sure you are aware, we -- WIPO does a lot of work on public domain in relation to copyright and not only copyright, we have a study that was as published as early as 2009, and we have had a publication on the relinquishment of copyright, whether it's possible or not to voluntarily leave work in the public domain. We do a lot of work on flexibility on open source. We can announce that we will have an online e-Learning course about software licensing focused on open source. We did the Creative Commons -- we will use Creative Commons. I could list many more projects, so as an agency, we are deeply engaged and we understand importance of all that part of the IP system, which is free, accessible material.
Which leads me to the next topic, which is -- okay. Sorry. Of course.
>> STEWART: Sorry, Paolo, just connected to that because Pranesh has sort of tweaked something in my mind. Connecting to the WSIS -- the current draft of the WSIS document is why I'm very surprised that intellectual property or copyright's not mentioned anywhere in it.
>> VICTOR OWADE: Thank you, Stewart, for those provoking questions -- good questions. We've been following the WSIS+10 process, of course, and like other stakeholders, are keenly aware of all the various interests that are represented in the zero-draft outcome document. We haven't made any submissions to the zero-draft outcome document. We haven't made any submissions to the zero-draft outcome, but we're following closely what's going on in the discussions in New York, and we'll be curious to hear, you know, what your views would be in as faras -- yes, intellectual property is not mentioned directly, but I'm curious to hear whether you think it should, if it shouldn't, so on and so forth, but we haven't made any -- we're watching it closely, but we haven't made any comments yet to the zero-draft.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: I think we can follow the discussion during the lunch break, if we ever get to it, and we now turn to a completely different environment, to an IP intensive industry, which is the video game industry, and beside being an IP intensive is like the fastest-growing creative industries currently in the market with almost two billion gamers worldwide. Depending on the different sources, the video game industry size range between 90- and 100 billion U.S. dollar revenues per year. These are huge numbers.
Only in the U.S. the industry employs more than 120,000 people with an average income of -- salary of 90,000 U.S. dollar. So video games is not only a multi-billion-dollar industry but have become a widely popular form of mass entertainment, and as a powerful platform for art. They have interplay of storytelling, graphics, music, all underpinned by software technology allowing for interaction with players.
In certain way they're set to become a major form of art of the new century. The sector is changing at a fast pace, largely driven by technological development and Internet access. Online gaming and other form of online exploitation, as you will see, are gaining increasingly higher market share, and governments around the world have started getting interested in the sector that employs tens of thousands of people, technicians, creators, software engineer, and generate important tax revenues as well, so WIPO was asked by stakeholders and member states to tackle and address the industry, like it's done in the past with studies on publishing or the audiovisual industry.
The industry is -- as already mentioned, is IP intensive, yes its interpreters and creators, especially small and medium enterprises, are not really aware of all legal and business implication, and so, for instance, video game developers may have little knowledge of the importance of copyrights in the development of video games. For that reason, WIPO has arranged the preparation of two studies that are freely available on the web. It's enough to Google video games WIPO to find them. We hope to license them soon through CC IGO license, but there are two studies that are starting -- providing an end tool for basic information in the sector. The first one is "Mastering the Game: Business and Legal Issues for the Developer," and it's really a guide to go through what are all the licensing issues that a developer need to take into account whenever they want to create a new game or what kind of rights need to be cleared in advance. For instance, to get clearance on the music or the audiovisual content of it. It's been authored by David Greenspan, that led a group of experts in the field, and the other study is the "Legal Status of Video Games: Comparative Analysis in National Approaches" that has been prepared by a team of lawyers led by Andy Ramos, who is our next speaker. Andy is -- beside being the author of this guide -- is a lecturer in IP and new technology and is a partner at Bardaji, Abogados Law Firm in Madrid. So he will talk about video games, touching upon the findings of the study but going beyond that as well.
Just to give you a flavor of what kind of question those studies are aimed -- are answering are, for instance, who is behind am video game? Is how many people and what kind of role are playing? Who are the creators? Who -- what rights are getting the people involved in the creation process? How is the chain of rights regulated? And another very important question that Andy will address is what are the role of gamers nowadays? Gamers are getting very, very high importance in terms of economic influence that they can have in the market. So with that, I would leave the floor to Andy, and I would ask the technical support to change the presentation, and Andy, the floor is yours.
>> ANDY RAMOS: Okay. Thank you very much, Paolo. Thank you, WIPO for giving me the opportunity to share this table with my colleagues.
I don't usually use presentations for this kind of short debate, but Paolo asked me to use one to -- so I can -- so you could have an understanding of this sector, which is, from my point of view, very unknown in general by society. My presentation will be quite eclectic. I am going to introduce many different elements on these matters. Some of them, I think, have real implications, others not that much, but I have the intention to discuss a little bit the beg eight, so we can discuss all these hot topics.
The first thing provides some numbers about the industry. For example, many people don't know that the script of a video game can have even more pages than a movie, over 2,000 pages. That's a -- the budget -- I'll give you a video game, for example, "grand Theft Auto V," was over $266 million, which is more than any blockbuster movie, or that the video games surpass the movie industry several years ago.
It's a huge market with tremendous numbers, but strangely enough, it's still perceived by society like an underground entertainment with basically no impact on the revelation, which I will explain during my presentation.
But let's start from the basics. One of the first video games was created over 50 years ago. It was a student from the MIT who wrote a code very rudimentary by today's standards. It became quite a popular in that year. Also, video game by (Inaudible) in the early years, the creator of this new class of works were exclusively engineers and computer geeks.
During the next decades, it's had a great impact on the video games. Nowadays, on the contrary, video games from my point of view have all the visual impact by many different elements that -- before.
Current video games have complexity difficult to imagine 30 years ago, and generally, are the result of the work of talent and effort of hundred of people, including software engineers, photographers, script writers, musical artists, performance. All these professionals have one thing in common, only one thing from my point of view. Many things, they are human, but they have other thing. They create works that can be protected by IP.
At the end of the day, the IP rights will be the real asset of the developer, including copyright, patent, trade secret, et cetera. From my point of view, the multiple complex works that we can enjoy in our -- in our society and the creation of these were extremely complex and needs a lot of licensing, contracts, et cetera.
Also, the stakeholders in the development or marketing of the given video game, it's numerous, including the publishers, who usually owns the IP rights of the -- of a given franchise, the developer who is contracted by the publisher to produce the game, the middleware provider who licensed the use of their technology to develop the video game, retailers, content manufacturers, online store, et cetera. Again, something common about all these player is the IP rights. They create and market these works created by their people.
I'm sorry to disappoint the audience, but at this stage, we have to talk about -- a little bit about law. As Paolo mentioned before, a couple of years ago WIPO commissioned a group of lawyers to analyze the legal status of video game in certain jurisdiction and also the mastering the game document analyzing that all creative and legal aspects of these kind of works.
We were very surprised when we discovered that almost no country in the world include in its legislation even a single mention to video games. Obviously, it doesn't mean that video games are unprotected, as the Berne Convention provides protection to literary and artistic work of authorship, but this makes sick and depraved minds of lawyer raises a lot of questions.
For example, what's the legal classification of video games and are they of the visual world, -- audiovisual work? Are they distributed without unitarily protection, are they software, which the industry and private sector understand that their product is basically software, are all contributors authors of the video game? Therefore, copyright holders? What's the legal regime applicable to transfer of rights in scenarios like labor or outsourcing relationship, and what's happening with the users, like Paolo mentioned before, can they claim any kind of rights during the interaction with the game or in some kind of an ancillary expectation?
I'm sure that not all those -- who are in the legal business that something is wrong with us, that nobody cares about these kind of issues. Maybe not, but some of them can have a real impact in the market.
Video games are the most complex works of authorship, as I mentioned before, and they come with explosions of portable technologies, like cell phone, like tablets. Now we can find the market very simple video games, like Pinball or Temple Run. Some are made by huge publishers and others by small- and medium-sized companies, and strangely enough, they are not -- most of them share the same computer code, so they are not scratch -- or they are not created from scratch. They use middleware previously created tested piece of software developed by an outside company as a technical basis for the video game, and only a small portion is customized to a specific game.
So who owns the -- it's still -- nowaday video games software, who owns the code, who should be the copyright holder of these kind of new entertainment software?
Another open issue that we discovered during the analysis is what's happened between the relationship of the developer and the creator when it's not grown by contract? Do video game authors always receive a fair compensation? In the movie or the industry, performers and authors receive royalties during the exploration of their work, but it's not customary in the video game industry, and what's happened in the contribution of the player by means of when they exploit or they use the video game? Again, I don't want to bore the audience, but this -- nowadays these questions have a real economic impact on the Internet.
I'm going to start -- to stop on this last point showing some things linking this with a topic of this congress and showing some actions that's happening right now on the Internet.
First it's e-Sports that's becomes massive popular in many countries, including the U.S. or Korea. We see a lot of official tournaments where 1,000 of e-Player, e-Sports player compete between each other and also private org nations and companies organizing their own competition without the -- without the authorization or without the permission of the copyright holder. Should -- you think that should a public or a company, a public entity use gaming platforms to organize tournaments and earn revenue from doing so? We can discuss it also later.
Also, game -- the game industry, we also see competitions in many -- in live events. We can define -- we could define that a gamer as a person who plays a video game and it's also not to observe that it's a gamer, so in legal speaking, a gamer is a person who performs literary or gamer work, and to spice up the debate, the do you think it feeds with the definition of article III of the convention? It doesn't mean that -- all of those Twittering right now, it doesn't mean I believe they should be paid as performers or actors, I just want to raise awareness of these actors and exploitation without taking into account all the stakeholders. We are seeing live event, thousands of people gathering, and in many occasions authors and contributors to the video game that are not taken into account.
Another example of these underground -- I'm finishing already. It's a gameplays, all those that are under 25 probably you don't see themotion of watching somebody else playing video games, but it's a huge phenomenon on the Internet. It there is one becoming an important YouTube user on the Internet who has more than 40 million, and all he does is post gameplays. Some sources estimate that he makes $500,000 a month by exploiting their -- he say gameplays. I don't know about (Inaudible), but I know a lot about this guy. He's a Spanish citizen. He's 25 years old, and he does the same as (Inaudible). He's a client of the law firm, and he does the same, he exploits gameplays and now has a close arrangement with a major movie distributors, like Sony Picture has released a couple of books, the first one sold over 200,000 copies, and it has a lot of elements of video game.
Again, do you need authorization from video game publishers to post a gameplay on the Internet? Is it under Fair Use Doctrine in countries where this exist? New open issues that we have to discuss, like in online gaming with -- with play -- with games where you can buy and sell virtual object. Can the user claim property over these objects? It's what kind of property, it's intellectual property or real property? Other games like, Little Bit Planet, when you can create on the Internet race track that you create on your own with the tools that the publisher provides you, are the terms of use of this platform fair? Would they like the user to submit all copyright without compensation to the publisher? What happens when you don't own a copy of the video game but just a license, can you resell them, the license, like in the Analog War, when they sell the copy, and finally, when you modify, add to the video game adding some code, are you transforming, are you creating a new word, do you need authorization, does the user need authorization for these kind of exploitation?
As conclusions, I think my point of views this is an unregulated sector which is in some ways good, but others not that good. I think that the legal nature of these modern and complex works of authorship should be determined. Also, the transfer or right -- the relationship between authors and developers and -- to establish at the end of the day a fair and equitable compensation system for all the parties involved in this area. Thank you very much.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Thank you very much, Andy. And I'm not sure whether -- I think we can open the floor for questions. We already passed 1:00. Is there other -- any comments or questions about the video games analysis? Because if -- I do have one question. You show us one of your clients, what's his name? His nickname is Elevuos. Okay. The guy buys a video game, plays the video game, records a gameplay, upload it on YouTube and gets money out of it because it's very popular. Can you -- I mean, does he have the right to do so? I mean, can -- did he acquire the right of making available from the publisher when he bought the video game? I would guess no. Beyond that, since the video game is a very complex work of art, it's not only the video game, it's the music, it's the audiovisual of the video game shown on the platform exercising making it available? So how is that working nowadays, it's just left to --
>> ANDY RAMOS: Nowadays there is a tolerance in, developers and publishers that own the video rights. Tacitly, this kind of exploitations, there has been some problem in the past, precisely with the music, that music libraries requested YouTube to eliminate some videos, some gameplays, not for the video game set, but just the music nowadays, the publisher consider this is a way to promote the video game, but nothing prevent them (Inaudible) in the future asking for permission.
>> PAOLO LANTERI: One question.
>> AUDIENCE: (Inaudible)
That's better. Thank you. (Inaudible) from Spain. I was thanking the presenter for the very good explanation the dynamic sector that creates a lot of uncertainties. I am -- an online game, Candy Crush was sold by a lot of dollars, and for example, first the fact that the video games are ending with a lot of barriers because they are accessible through the phone, so not just many gamers. Many games, for example, this one, Candy Crush, is in principle free, but if you are a stack, you can purchase some extras that allows you to move to the next screen, but then sometimes this fails, and it is very subtle mistake that cost you a few cents because it's based on micro payments, but then it's very difficult for anyone to claim that they paid and that these small extras were lost. There are issues of jurisdictions, micro payments, how you claim back this small payment that is going to cost you much more. In the USA there are class actions when one cannot ascertain that the company is benefiting individually from this but individuals in this position are not in a position to claim back this money, so there are jurisdiction problems and a lot of new problems generated by this kind of video game, so I think it's very important to deal with all the legal issues related to them, and I don't know if you have any experience or have heard of any case related to this kind of problems. Thank you.
>> ANDY RAMOS: Yeah. There are many cases, and actually the European union authorized this because this is a problem of consumer rights, and a couple of years ago they enact a new directive that tried to point that out to try to defend consumers with these micro payments, with children, especially, that they are using cell phones also or taking their parents' cell phones without knowing it, they're paying with the cell phone, and this is obviously a big issue, and that's something that I -- from my point of view hasn't been addressed properly yet.
Also, the discussion, the debate at least exists in Europe.
>> VICTOR OWADE: Okay. With that, thank you very much to all of you for staying with us. That concludes this WIPO Open Forum session. Thank you to Andy and Ronaldo and Paolo.
(Applause)
And do have a good lunch.