02 Aug Bloggers put media’s copycon coverage to shame

Why is Canada’s news media doing such a shoddy job covering the copyright consultations now taking place in select cities across part of Canada?

At the heart of the consultations on planned changes Canada’s copyright law lies a fundamental question: Should the law protect authors of creative work, or corporate intermediaries who traditionally profited from the massive effort formerly required to reproduce and distribute them?

Thanks to digital technology, the cost of copying and distributing works is rapidly approaching zero. Naturally, those who once profited from copying and distributing creative works are frantically trying to stem the flow of creative works, advocating ever-lengthening copyright protection,  and mandatory enforcement of consumer-hostile technologies that prevent all copying, legal or otherwise. In many cases, they have co-opted creator organizations to their cause.

Not surprisingly, news organizations tend to view this question through the lens of corporate intermediaries. With exceptions, they frame the debate in terms University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer describes as, “the caricature of toiling creators vs. freeloading pirates.”

CBC News has been a striking example. Its scanty coverage of the consultations has embraced the corporate caricature. (No links because, for some reason, the stories never make their way to the CBC’s quixotically selective website.)

A crucial technical issue in the current consultations is the precise definition of the “fair dealing” exceptions that copyright law provides for educational, archival, satirical, and creative uses. Current Canadian rules on fair dealing are among the most restrictive in the world, and the industry lobbyists want to make them even more restrictive.

The CBC inadvertently illustrated this approach with its astonishing intervention to take down the YouTube video at the heart of the wafergate foofarah, a travesty exposed by Maclean’s blogger Kady O’Malley. Turns out the takedown required only a phone call. When a putative rights-holder phones Google-owned YouTube and asserts a copyright violation, Google’s default position is that the video comes down.

In this case, the video constituted a tiny segment of a lengthy live broadcast. It was shot at a public event. It was filmed at taxpayer expense, on behalf of a pool of competitive news organizations, all of whom enjoyed an unrestricted right to disseminate it. It constituted primary source material for a controversy newsworthy enough to appear on all network newscasts and in all major Canadian newspapers.

But CBC decided public access to this video was not covered by fair dealing, and that ended the matter.

Fortunately, there are many better ways to follow the consultations than by reading the newspaper or tuning in CBC:

• Law professor Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of  Ottawa, has been a one-man dynamo disseminating material on the CopyCon consultation, including a webpage dedicated to the process, his own thoughtful presentation, and a twitter feed replete with useful and interesting links.
• A terrific presentation to last week’s CopyCon session at Gatineau, Quebec, by Prof. Laura J. Murray, undergraduate chair of the Queens University English Department and co-author of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide.
• This MP3 audio transcript of the Gatineau hearings, with many thoughtful presentations:
• An excellent episode of the CBC Radio program Spark reviewed the complex issues underlying copyright in a digital era, including the interview below with Duke University copyright expert James Boyle, author of  The Public Domain, Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (available at Amazon or under a Creative Commons License for free download or online reading):
  
• A handful of worthy exceptions to my general complaint about shoddy news coverage, these short pieces by Sun Media and the National Post,  including this column by David Akin, national affairs correspondent for CanWest News, and this summary of intervener positions by the CBC’s Emily Chung.
• The #copycon hashtag on Twitter.
• The official website of the copyright consultation.
• This catalog of the unintended negative consequences of the US Government’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed seven years ago in response to the same vigorous industry lobbying that has moved the Harper Government to re-write Canada’s laws.