Fair use gets narrower in Canada
January 17th, 2006 by amandaThe New York Times reports (registration required) that a Canadian news-parody show akin to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show has been forbidden to use video clips of political debates.
[D]uring the current Canadian federal election campaign, Canada’s television satirists have faced an issue that has never troubled “The Daily Show.” An agreement between Canada’s main television networks and its largest political parties blocks the shows from using film clips from the televised leaders’ debates (although the film is still available to conventional news and current affairs shows).
“It speaks for the parties’ great respect for the power of satirical shows that they would demand this,” said Roger Abbott, an Air Farce performer and writer.
Let’s get this straight. It’s OK for Canadian citizens to see a clip of the prime minister debating — if the person commenting on the clip is serious. But it’s not OK if the person commenting on it is making a joke?
This is a terrible precedent. (And yes, I think it’s a precedent even though I live in the United States.) It’s terrible because it chops off yet another piece of our historic right to fair use. Let’s review: Fair use means taking a small snippet of something (like 15 seconds of an hour-long debate) and using it in another context. A TV show doing something like that is obviously not trying to recreate the whole debate. They’re not competing with the producers of the debate, and they’re not making money by copying somebody else’s product. They’re making their own original work. That’s been legal for a long time, and it should stay legal.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the consortium of TV broadcasters that produce the Canadian debates made a Faustian bargain and gave up a big chunk of that long-established right to fair use.
[...]CBC spokesman, Jason MacDonald, who also speaks for the consortium, said that the rule dates back several years; the networks, he explained, agreed to the politicians’ demand in exchange for a promise that campaigns would not use debate clips in their ads.
Translation: TV stations agreed not to let comedians make fun of politicians, and in return the politicians promised not to…um…hold each other accountable for what they said in a public debate. Wait — how is that a fair trade? (Yes, I understand that politicians often use misleading clips in their ads. Even so, is that a reason to forbid their use?)
What’s most disappointing in this news story is the TV stations’ lack of backbone. Politicians running for office need TV a lot more than TV needs them. Instead of acting like professionals, the Canadian consortium seems to have rolled over and given up fair-use rights that have been established (at least in the U.S.) for a very long time.
Apparently the comedians came up with a makeshift solution:
Mr. Abbott said that Air Farce considered declaring itself a news program, but in the end its cast used one of its specialties – impersonation – to create mock versions of the debates.
Clever, but I wish they’d fought harder to use the clips. Every piece of ground we give up in the fight for fair and reasonable copyright policy is a piece we’ll have to re-take someday in the future.