MediaPolicy.ca

January 30, 2018

The opposition to Fairplay Canada’s campaign against movie-thievery arrived on-cue, and off-key, as expected.

The industry coalition of Canadian unions, guilds, broadcasters, and film studios is asking the CRTC to stop the whack-a-mole game of chasing offshore pirate websites and institute an effective geo-blocking regime that stops the most blatant theft sites. Twenty countries including Great Britain, France, South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Greece and Denmark have already done what Fairplay is proposing: protect their own cultural industries from thieves.

The Fairplay Coalition, including the media unions Unifor, ACTRA, IATSE, and the Director’s Guild, wants a stop to the job-killing drain of $500 million annually from the Canadian movie and TV industry.

Predictably, the apologists for the big rip-off claim to speak in the name of Internet freedom, using the tired gun-nut argument that if government curbs the freedom to be extreme, then tomorrow we will be living in a police state. To quote Open Media’s Laura Tribe, “it will be an official Internet censorship committee…and open the door for overreaching censorship in Canada… like using a machine gun to kill a mosquito.”

Well, it hasn’t happened in any of the democracies that have taken action.

University of Ottawa copyright prof Michael Geist, the best known libertarian voice for a world wild web, says that a website blocking law would be without judicial oversight. He’s wrong: the Federal Court can review any CRTC action.

He casts doubt on the actual size of the massive revenue leak, meaning it might only be $250 million instead of $500 million: as if stealing fewer millions would be okay.

More to the point: do the Internet libertarians have any clue about the impact on honest hard-working Canadians toiling in our TV and film companies that are losing these millions?

Film set hairdresser Peggy Kyriakidou is one such media worker.

“Making a decent living in the film industry is a struggle,” said the single-mother working in Toronto’s film business for the last 25 years.

“The work isn’t steady and our incomes are dictated by the profitability of the studios. It’s tough making ends meet. Stealing movies makes it so much harder.”

Bell Media CTV’s crime reporter Stéphane Giroux sees it the same way:

“We’ve had layoffs at the Montréal station and we work hard to deliver important local stories under tight budgets,” said the 25-year veteran on the Québec news scene.

“People imagine broadcasters are rolling in money, but only a handful of local TV stations in Canada turn a profit. Our owner makes money on its movie business that it spends on local news. We can’t afford to have millions stolen by pirate websites.”

It’s look-in-the-mirror time for us all, not just Mr. Geist. Is it okay to steal from Bell (which employs 50,000 Canadians), Rogers (25,000), Shaw Communications (20,000), or Québecor (10,000) because they are “big” and “they can afford it.”? Peggy and Stéphane would say no.

How many Canadian media workers have to pay the price for piracy before we stop taking the name of Internet freedom in vain?

December 8, 2017

On September 28 when Heritage Minister Melanie Joly announced she was doing nothing for local news, but that local news was nonetheless a “pillar” of her vision for media, I said to myself: it’s going to take bodies, lots of bodies.

Here are the bodies: Postmedia and Torstar announced on November 27th they were swapping local weekly and daily papers. Thirty-six of them immediately closed, 21 by Postmedia and 14 by Torstar, including dailies the Orillia Packet & Times, the Barrie Examiner, Metro Vancouver, and Metro Winnipeg. Three hundred journalists and media workers were fired.

The swap and close was a workaround federal collusion laws. It is of course, collusion by any other name. Both Postmedia and Torstar claim they had no idea the other would close almost all of their newly acquired papers, despite doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

The closings were driven by plunging newsmedia revenues. Postmedia consolidated its Ottawa footprint as Torstar mostly withdrew from the capital region. Torstar consolidated in the Niagara and Kawartha regions as Postmedia stepped back.

Postmedia’s Paul Godfrey was not especially skilled in his corporate humility, wasting no time in (correctly) blaming Minister Joly for her inaction. Annoyed, the Minister shot back that the closings were “cynical.”

Torstar meekly protested that it was not creating news deserts (only news monopolies).

The news deserts aren’t far away. When Torstar bought the Cambridge Reporter in 1999, a Torstar executive told me that “we didn’t buy [the Reporter] just to close it.” This despite the Reporter being a competitor to Torstar’s larger daily in Kitchener

Four years later, they closed the Reporter.

The federal Competition Bureau announced it will investigate the latest swap and close.

Don’t expect much. In 2014 Black Press and Glacier Media did the same thing, swapping and closing a long list of weeklies in British Columbia. The Bureau did nothing, likely because advertisers still have lots of ways to reach consumers, including television, radio, Facebook and Google. And on the reader side of the equation, losing access to a free commodity doesn’t sound much like a restraint of trade.

Mind you the political atmosphere in 2017 is different from 2014 and the change in government makes interesting speculation about what the Competition Bureau might do. The Trudeau government has been embarrassed by its lack of action on local news and a scapegoat could be just the thing.

Meanwhile, nothing has changed the basics of the local news problem. Google and Facebook have irreparably broken the link between advertising revenue and journalism. The Liberals are either going to do something about this or watch journalism die on its watch.

It’s time for the Liberals to put its money where its mouth is and save local news. They’ve been offered a full menu of options by Unifor, Newsmedia Canada, its own consultant in the Shattered Mirror report, and notably by the Liberal-dominated parliamentary Heritage Committee.

It’s not just financial assistance that’s needed. It’s leadership. If it weren’t for Postmedia and Torstar’s collusion, many of those 36 local papers might have found new community owners, including employee co-ops, and survived a few more years while the Liberals make up their minds about saving journalism.

In fact, the Liberals could even think about a quid pro quo. In exchange for serious federal assistance to local journalism, news companies planning to close local papers would be obliged to provide public notice of closing, repudiate collusion aimed at creating news monopolies, and co-operate in the transition to community ownership.

That would be federal leadership.