Julianna Yau’s blog

The internet has been raging with bill C-10, which seems to have become the new media baby now that the government is dragging its feet with releasing the proposed copyright legislation.

Geist is surprisingly brief on his coverage of the activity, with a mere mention and pointing people to one of the anti-C-10 Facebook groups.

The Canadian Conference of the Arts issued a press release on the matter (I’m linking to my own blog because I can’t find it on their website), as did ACTRA and the Directors Guild of Canada.

Trying to read through the entire bill is a nightmare, and I’m grateful to “FF Canuck” for finding the relevant text in the bill. The offending text, in short, is that “public financial support of the production [of a Canadian film or video] would not be contrary to public policy”.

While I agree with some criticisms that this isn’t necessarily or specifically a censorship clause, anyone who reads between the lines (or any of the articles covering the issue) knows its intent is to facilitate censorship. It’s chillingly familiar to the undertones of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and it’s no wonder everyone is aghast.

Just what exactly is “contrary to public policy”? What exactly is “public policy”? Who decides what “public policy” is and whether a work is contrary to it?

Surely the Canadian government shouldn’t be allowing hateful propaganda, but where do we draw the line…and, more importantly, from where do we draw the line? As others have noted, other provisions are in place to ensure that works which violate human rights are not allowed to be distributed. Is it really the place of the governmental branch in charge of tax credits to determine whether a film should be funded?

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I was responding to some of the comments on my review of the copyright panel discussion on TVO, and got onto a thought tangent that I decided to develop into a full post instead.

My understanding is that, under current copyright law, when I sell one of my sculptures I am only selling the sculpture–not the right to reproduce it or images of it (unless I have also licenced the buyer to make such reproductions). Naturally, I’m not going to sue my patrons if my sculptures end up in an album of family pictures, but would want to strike a licensing deal if they wanted to use images of the sculpture to help promote their business.

Luckily for me, the distribution of images of my sculptures doesn’t (in my mind) negatively impact the sale of my sculptures, because anyone who wants to own the sculpture will not be satisfied by a picture of it. In fact, the distribution of pictures of my sculptures may possibly increase interest in my work and the chance of a sale.

However, the duplication of the sculpture into another sculpture would be something that I would be concerned about because it would have high potential for decreasing my sales (and also infringes my moral rights… but that’s a whole other topic) and influencing the value of my work (because all my work is unique; I am not in the practise of creating series or limited editions of my sculptures).

How does this translate to creative works which can be faithfully recreated digitally? Not merely music, but literature, software, movies and various forms of visual art (e.g. photography) can be digitally reproduced almost perfectly. We have seen for music that recorded songs can be rethought to be not the product but the advertising, and the live concerts to be the products. We have also seen for software that the software can be rethought to be not the product, and have the product be consulting and support for software.

But what about movies and visual art? Do we saturate movies with product placement? Do we rely solely on governmental and corporate sponsorship for visual art? Do we simply levy the heck out of everything to pay the creators? I’d like to hear any suggestions. Honestly.

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I recently learned that Purple Violets, an independent movie by Edward Burns, was available exclusively on iTunes. Being a movie fan, I rebooted my computer into Windows, and went to the PV website so I could buy the movie.

Although I watch almost anything (including bad movies out of curiosity or boredom), the synopsis for Purple Violets lost me at: “…relationship comedy about four friends from college ready for change”. That tagline alone was enough to kill my excitement for the movie’s method of availability. Still, because I had already logged out of Linux and into Windows, I thought I would follow through with it and test the process for buying the movie.

After Apple updated my version of iTunes, I infuriatingly discovered that the movie, like Hotel Chevalier in the weeks before it was bundled with the theatrical showing of The Darjeeling Limited, was only available to customers with an American billing address. This was not a big loss, considering I wasn’t looking forwards to having to watch a “…relationship comedy about four friends from college ready for change”. But if this trend continues, I may not be able to see many movies because an online store doesn’t allow customers outside of the US to purchase their digital files.

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