Canada’s Anti-Copyright Crusaders Play Games and Spread Panic
Super Mario (TM) chess image courtesy me and my little camera. This silly game is way more complex and nuanced than anything you’ll see from the anti-copyright side.
Lately, the Copyright Act has been getting a bit of positive attention in the media, which means I’ve had to do a LOT of explaining to media about how I view this complicated, poorly understood, but crucial law. Inevitably, that means I also have to counter many of the simplistic and naïve anti-copyright myths that spread like contagion whenever a nuanced understanding of the law is required.
Canada has a small but loud anti-copyright brigade – mostly well-paid academics or lawyers (or both) in thrall to the legend of Big Tech and the idea that the digital era is going to “liberate” the world’s knowledge, creating some sort of all-knowing paradise for us all.
How’s that working out? Cough, cough… Facebook, Twitter, Google?
So, with long-overdue copyright term extension and repair of Canada’s decade-long educational copying fiasco both being mentioned in the recent federal budget, the anti-copyright batshit signal shone out in the night, and the usual suspects dusted off their utility belts of rhetoric for another run at the misinformation game.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
First up, occasional law professor, fulltime self-promoter, and prolific blogger Michael Geist. History instructs that Geist must be first out of the gate on these things, because what are the others going to say if they don’t have Geist’s lead to follow?
An established way of spreading myths about copyright is to suggest that any progressive copyright changes that help artists have been done in secret at the behest of greedy lobbyists. Those of us familiar with these rhetorical games call this gambit “geisting the facts,” and our man does not disappoint. Very soon after the budget’s release, Geist starts talking on his blog about “Budget 2022’s Hidden Copyright Term Extension.” [emphasis mine]
Hidden? Hmmm. Just how would a government go about hiding proposed legislative actions in a highly-scrutinized public document like Budget 2022. Do they have some sort of secret invisible-text function none of us are aware of?
The copyright term extension is so well hidden, in fact, it appears for anyone to see on page 274 of the Budget under the heading Proposed Legislative Action. I found it almost immediately, and I’m not really that fast a reader. I know Geist is some sort of recognized expert on technology, so I assume he’s aware of document search functions. He didn’t even need to read to page 274. He could have just searched for “copyright term extension” and… voila, not hidden at all.
No such thing as bad student; only bad teacher
And yet, the myth of the hidden copyright change gained some traction. A week after that first suggestion of subterfuge, Geist-adjacent lawyer Howard Knopf expanded on the myth, blathering that term extension “is deviously hidden at page 274 in Annex 3 in a manner so as to avoid detection, debate and the democratic process itself.”
Left in plain sight for anyone to read? That is devious — diabolical even. I can’t believe more governments haven’t thought of hiding their intentions by very publicly announcing their intentions.
Knopf actually gains points in this anti-copyright Super Mario (TM) chess match by asserting the government “caved in to greedy lobbyists to the detriment of democracy.”
Greedy lobbyists! Everybody drink!
Full disclosure, I am a registered lobbyist, and a lot of my lobbying in Ottawa is related to copyright reform and repair. That’s all a matter of public record because I register and declare every single meeting I have on the subject with the government, all of which is on the public record (see image below). Am I greedy? If I am, I picked the wrong industry to lobby for, that’s for sure.
You know who else has a LOT of contact with government on the topic of copyright — Michael Geist. I know this because his name comes up an awful lot in my own meetings, and I am often told he’s already been in touch with the person I’m there to see. But try searching his name in the lobbying database, and see what comes up. Nada (see image below). It’s almost as if his contact with government on this file is… what’s the word?... hidden, or secret.
Enter the mouse
No copyright fear-mongering is complete without a throwaway reference to Walt Disney, so full points to practiced geister, Meera Nair, Copyright Specialist for the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), who gets right to some point or other in her blog about the budget. “Lengthening copyright term will please the likes of Disney…” she writes, presumably because there’s nothing scarier to the anti-copyright crowd than a cartoon mouse? Rather than detailing any actual problems with term extension, she throws back to her rhetorical guide. “Michael Geist has described some of the harm that will be inflicted on Canadians.”
Harm? What harm? Geist actually tries to convince us that it will be writers who suffer from having “their works locked out of the public domain,” and being “lost for a generation” as though that’s an actual thing that’s possible. I mean, two of the authors he mentions, Marian Engel and Margaret Laurence were early Chairs of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and copies of all their books are widely available in stores and libraries across the country but, okay, they will cease to exist as soon as the copyright term is extended.
What nonsense.
Side-note: if an anti-copyrighter can work in reference to a lock, chain and/or prison, they advance to GO on the, um, chessboard, so well done professor.
These fear-mongering games are silly and seemingly without end. One can only hope that after years of being continually harangued with them, the actual decision-makers in Ottawa can now see them for the smokescreen they are. I mean, these jokers have made making shit up about copyright law their full-time pursuits, so it’s not like they’ll stop anytime soon. People just have to improve their filters. We all need to get better at knowing when we’re being geisted.
The great geisting
Final, and most egregious, case in point. In his latest attack on copyright term extension, Geist tries to show that even prominent artists don’t like the idea. He latches on to a Parliamentary submission from Canadian rock star Bryan Adams, suggesting the popular musician is unequivocally against such a thing (SPOILER: he’s not), and fails to note that in his submission Adams is actually asking for a completely different, creator-friendly change to the law.
If the copyright term is to be extended by 20 years, Adams argues, then something should be done to help those artists who assigned their copyright in contracts long ago, so they can actually benefit from the extension. Geist suggests Adams’ point is an apple (don’t like term extension), when it is actually a big bag of oranges meant to help sustain artists after a long career of creating cultural works (please help us benefit from term extension).
I mean, Geist literally stops quoting Bryan Adams right before his key point about the right to terminate assignment of copyright. Here it is:
“Granting the right of termination is an interesting and effective way to balance copyright duration with creators’ continued remuneration.”
For the record, I agree with Adams, have met with him on the subject, and even penned a letter to the Prime Minister to support his call for a termination right.
I struggle to find a polite way to describe this latest bit of geisting. In my opinion, it’s garbage argumentation, far below the standards this country should expect from someone to whom we’re paying extremely good money for academic services. Geist — if he hasn’t already told you — is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, a position that has helped him to a very prominent placement on Ontario’s Sunshine List of public sector salaries. I mean, we want our extraordinarily well-paid Research Chairs to be able to grasp and accurately communicate nuanced arguments in their area of “expertise,” no?
Now, I’m no big city Research Chair, but I have a Master’s degree and have done my share of teaching. If I were grading Geist on his argument about Bryan Adams, he’d get an F.
