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By: Robert Labossiere
The MC at Bill Craig's presentation to the Interactive Multimedia Arts & Technologies Association last Wednesday jokingly called the meeting back after break with the announcement, "Mr. Craig, there's a subpoena here for you." Craig is CEO and the 'man with the idea' behind iCraveTV, an Internet start-up that is re-broadcasting live television on the Internet. Launched in late November, iCraveTV attracted over 800,000 visitors to its site in December alone, enough to convince advertisers that this is a dot.com company worth their marketing dollars.
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iCraveTV carries 17 channels, everything that is broadcast into the airwaves from an antenna in the Toronto area, where iCraveTV is located. iCraveTV does not pay to digitize the signal it is drawing or for the right to serve it up on the Internet. iCraveTV does not just carry the signal however, it frames it in the iCraveTV logo and in paid-for advertising. Which is why, on Thursday, not 24 hours after the IMAT jest, a lawsuit was launched against iCraveTV by two professional sports leagues, 10 movie companies and 3 TV networks in the U.S.
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Internet casting is not something they bargained for and it is not something they are about to let run free, no matter how wild the electronic 'frontier' may be |
At issue is copyright, more precisely the intellectual property rights, of broadcasters over the programs they have licensed for broadcast. Internet-casting is not something they bargained for and it is not something they are about to let run free, no matter how wild the electronic 'frontier' may be.
But the suit will also have a lot to say about the people who make the stuff that gets broadcast, the writers, musicians, cinematographers, actors and producers who collectively author the programs we see on TV.
In the media industry, everything is done by licence. If you make a program and somebody agrees to show it, you grant them a licence, usually for one broadcast. If you are lucky, the program is a hit and you licence it again and again in different countries, to different markets.
That's how the copyright system works, or at least worked up until now. Under the old system, internet delivery of programs-whether the 'game of the week' or the latest episode of 'Mystery'-was generally not one of the rights granted by licence. The rules we've been following say that internet rights, or electronic rights as they are often called, are separate from broadcast rights. If your contract doesn't cover Internet or other electronic use, then they are not included. But that was then....
Along comes Craig with a career's-worth of television and media experience, saying he doesn't need any special grant of rights to do what he is doing. For Craig, Internet-casting is the same as broadcasting and Canadian copyright law lets anyone retransmit a publicly available signal so long as they carry the signal simultaneously and in its entirely, and pay royalties fixed by the Copyright Board.
Craig says he is prepared to pay but the process is that the rights holders have to apply to the Copyright Board for a tariff.
But for U.S. companies who are not covered by Canadian law, that's no solution. In any event, applications to the Copyright Board take months, if not years, and in the meantime, there's at least one Superbowl to re-transmit.
But it is curious, to say the least, to hear Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America declaring "This kind of cyberspace stealing must be stopped..." The reality is that all kinds of original content is flying around in cyberspace without the rights to it having been 'cleared' in the conventional way, and that some of the biggest players in cyberspace have had the most dubious policies.
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Freelance authors have been struggling with the consequence of that push since at least 1996. Now that the 'big boys' are on board, maybe we'll see some action |
There are three separate legal cases pending in Canada over these type of issues. Thomson Corporation, publisher of the Globe and Mail, is defending against a $30 million lawsuit launched in 1996 by freelance journalists after they found copies of their articles used on the Globe's database InfoGlobe. English language journalists in Quebec launched a similar case against the Southam paper, the Gazette, in Montreal and another case was launched in June 1999 by francophone journalists against the French language magazines and newspapers in Quebec and the major French online database CEDROM-SNI.
You have to hand it to Bill Craig for surging along with the flow. What he is doing is pushing limits. Freelance authors have been struggling with the consequence of that push since at least 1996. Now that the 'big boys' are on board, maybe we'll see some action.
Ironically, Craig congratulated the Canadian Radio and Television Commission for its decision, announced in December, that it would not regulate the Internet. Without regulation, iCraveTV can do what it wants without supervision, standing on the letter of Canadian copyright law. Most of the media, certainly all of the commercial media, opposed CRTC regulation. Word has it that they are changing their tune now and may ask the CRTC to revisit that decision.
Should the people who create television programs and who are finding their work "ripped" all over the Internet celebrate the lawsuit against iCraveTV? Certainly a lot of the creative people attending Craig's presentation at IMAT voiced their concern about copyright: if broadcasters are not paid, how can they expect to be paid? And for cultural producers it rankles to show common cause with U.S. broadcasters, sports teams and movie companies, the very businesses that are converging media into a global monoculture.
Craig's style, to take and figure out how to pay for content later, leaves a lot to be desired. On the other hand, iCraveTV has brought out the issue of fair copyright practices, practices that big businesses like Thomson, Southam have refused to acknowledge are tantamount to theft. It will be a little more difficult for them now to argue that the practice of taking first, asking later is acceptable.
Which isn't to say iCraveTV should become a cause celebre either. Craig, a career media man who counts buying up Minnesota cable stations for Ted Rogers among his accomplishments, is only doing what his task masters taught him to do. What plays best in the largely ungoverned electronic frontier is whatever you can get away with.
Copyright 2000 Robert Labossiere. Reproduction of this article in electronic or other media is strictly prohibited without express permission of the author.
Robert Labossiere has been involved in alternative publishing and independent presses since 1982 when he helped co-found the Winnipeg culture-crit magazine Midcontinental. He has also written for Fuse and others. In the mid-eighties he succumbed to an uncontrollable urge to impale himself on the status quo and went to law school. His law practice since 1992 has focussed in part on the creative community. He is presently the Executive Director of The Electronic Rights Licensing Agency (TERLA) a copyright collective that represents Canadian freelance writers, photographers and illustrators.
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