Wendy Grossman has written a good overview of the Broadcast Treaty proceedings at WIPO for Wired News — this is a treaty that EFF is fighting, which would allow broadcasters to control what you and others do with their broadcasts regardless of whether those broadcasts contain public-domain or uncopyrightable material:
Cory Doctorow, the London-based European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF, highlights two additional sources of worry. First, the US, represented in Geneva by the Patent Office, is demanding that the treaty include webcasting. If that proposal should pass, broadcast rights could apply to anything downloaded from any Web site, making it impossible to be sure whether even open-source software wasn't covered.
Second, Doctorow said, one proposal in the draft treaty requires that receivers, defined as any device that can decrypt broadcasts, must incorporate technology to protect those broadcasts. As currently drafted, he believes that would include general-purpose computers.
That clause in the draft treaty echoes recent US legislation that introduced the "broadcast flag," a technical control that must be implemented by July 1, 2005 for all devices for sales in the US that receive television signals.