Claude sez,
UNESCO announced the launch of its World Anti-Piracy Observatory in a YouTube video on April 21, 2010, but according to French Wikipedia – an entry coyly started as "193.242.192.9" – the idea hearkens back to 2005, and reeks of it.
Particularly notable: WAPO's "collection of national copyright laws", where each country's page is linked to a "Disclaimer" in which UNESCO claims copyright on the content of the collection and restricts its use to educational, non commercial purposes – even though in most cases, they simply downloaded the copyright law from the official site, renamed the file and re-uploaded it on the UNESCO server.
There are also some gems of inaccuracy in the countries' PDFs that are linked to in the sections of WAPO that are listed in the left column – but putting copyright laws that are either in the public domain or copyrighted to the country's parliament under UNESCO's own copyright is the next-to-worst one. The worst one being, of course the use of the word "piracy" – which even WIPO has given up long ago.
As messages about these and other issues sent by several people to the address provided in WAPO's "Contact Us" page remain systematically unanswered, it would be nice if BoingBoing could write something about WAPO, because it would be more difficult for them to ignore it.
(Thanks, Claude!)
