Canada's Debate

I know that it’s a bit odd for me to ignore a political story regarding possible copyright infringement given how frequently I talk about it here , but I’ve been staying away from Tories in breech of copyright story deliberately… however, a talk with a fellow blogger angried up my blood a bit, so I feel that it’s time.

The television ads, which began airing Monday, use footage from last fall’s Liberal leadership debates to deliver the message that the new Grit leader is weak, indecisive and an environmental failure. But that footage belongs to a consortium of TV networks which pooled their resources to provide live coverage of the debates…The networks are now looking into how the Conservatives obtained the debate footage for their ads. CPAC anchor Peter Van Dusen said Monday that any outside use of debate video would have to be approved by all pool members. Moreover, he said such video is traditionally never authorized for use by political parties.

Van Dusen said he is not aware of any request by the Tory party to buy or use any portion of the debate videos.

The attack ads levelled against Dion were amateurish and of poor quality, but as the blogging tories are oh-so-happy to point out, 28% of Canadians are undecided about Dion’s environmental credentials. That is a big group of people, and it would be foolish of a political party to leave that alone… and that’s not the issue

Now, the reason I’ve been silent on the issue is quite frankly I think this whole “copyright violation” story is interesting for all the wrong reasons. Yes, the footage is owned by a pool of news outlets and in theory all of them have to approve it’s use, and apparently the Tories procured it in some other way. The interesting bit, for me at least, comes from something I picked up in a column that appeared in a lot of newspapers (emphasis mine):

Geist said the use of such video clips in political ads would be entirely proper in the United States, which applies a broad “fair use doctrine” to its copyright laws. The fact that the Tory ads raise questions here highlights the shortcomings of Canadian law, he added.

“Frankly, it should be beyond doubt that they should be able to use short clips of these kinds of public political events that should fall under a fair use doctrine. I think it’s unfortunate that under Canadian copyright law there is some level of uncertainty.”

Copyright law in Canada doesn’t work quite as smoothly as most of us thinks it does, and the Conservatives could easily claim a criticism exception. What is interesting is the fact that nobody has done so before. To me this is yet another signal that the Conservatives don’t recognize the Canadian political tradition. Canada has a strong unwritten constitution; tradition is essential for the smooth and harmonious operation of our government; and it is quite clear that Stephen Harper doesn’t give two shits about that so long as he gets to run the show.