Posted on Sunday 4 May 2008
The title of this essay is in French because I just didn’t know how to say it politely in English. Last night, I had the privilege of attending the 16th Governor General’s Awards for the Performing Arts honouring outstanding Canadian performers.
The Honourees for 2008 included: famed pianist Anton Kuerti, comic Eugene Levy, dancer and choreographer Brian MacDonald, playwright John Murrell, aboriginal filmographer Alanis Obomsawin, Montreal rocker Michel (Pag) Pagliaro, fundraiser extraordinaire Eric Charman and Kingston band, The Tragically Hip (the 2008 National Arts Centre Award winner).
My beef was that unbelievable performances by Pagliaro and the Hip, cool short videos about each of the award winners (except Eugene Levy but more on that later), a dance by Cyrstal Pite that was one of the greatest performances I have ever witnessed (she has the strength of a man, moves like a hip hop artist on steroids but with much, much more poise and control, illustrates completely new, never before seen choreography, has an unbelievable CV for such a young person, runs her own dance company and is incredibly beautiful as well) and much more, may never be seen again.
Huh, why is that? Well, for one, the CBC decided not to record the show for later rebroadcast due to cutbacks within that organization. But maybe more importantly, because no one was recording it for Veoh, YouTube or whatever.
You know, the only way these outstanding performances could have been kept for posterity would have been if someone (please) had bootlegged in a video camera and uploaded them to the Internet or if the organizers of the event would take on entrenched interests and do it themselves.
But it is almost impossible to do.
A few years ago, I wanted to do a video of a lecture I give—the 25 Steps to Entrepreneurial Success. I thought: “Wouldn’t it be cool to use a few film clips from Hollywood shows that the students might find funny and educational at the same time?” Well, it didn’t take very long to find out that it is impossible to do that even in an entirely non-commercial, educational film.
I wanted to use Ben Affleck’s short speech in the film, Boiler Room, called ABC—Always Be Closing or, as he calls it in the film, Don’t Pitch the B_tch. It’s funny, rude, poignant and, if taken the right way, reinforces the idea that entrepreneurs have to be able to sell—sell their ideas to funders and to employees, sell their products and services to clients and customers, even sell to suppliers (to get supplier credit, for example). If you can’t sell, you can’t be an entrepreneur. (I am not suggesting that you should sell worthless stock to vulnerable people, BTW.)
To get permission to use a film clip, you need the permission of the copyright holder (usually a studio), the producer or producers, the director and each of the actors in the clip (in this clip there is Mr. Affleck and about 15 young men learning to sell). That is a difficult job, no doubt. But it gets worse—you also need to the permission of the person or persons who penned the score (there is music in practically every scene in a Hollywood film) and, wait for it, every musician who played during that clip. You just couldn’t do it. These people would be scattered all over the globe, some of them might be dead and then you would have to find their heirs and assigns and get them to agree too.
Last night, every award winner had a short film done on them except Eugene Levy. Why? I don’t know but I suspect the above may have something to do with it. How about some scenes from his hilarious days with SCTV (Second City TV)? None to be seen, you only got reference to it by Eugene’s introducer, funny man Martin Short. How about something G-rated from American Pie? Nope.
That is why so much of what you see on Veoh and YouTube is bootlegged—there is no legal way to do anything. In my view, the music industry, the film industry, the creative industry, well, they are all crazy.
Long, long before iTunes and Napster (in 1995!), Andres del Castillo (from the band Eight Seconds—Kiss You (When you’re Dangerous)) and I suggested to Dr. Michael Cowpland, when he ran Corel Corporation at its peak, he start a service called the SoundBox. Andres had created a wonderful series of copyright-free music CDs for Corel that creators could use to make all sorts of content. Mike was too busy at the time to take us up on the thought that this could also be an online service and could include other tunes as well but we might have created Napster or iTunes in Canada well before anyone else thought of it.
The Music Industry has decided to sue its customers instead of taking advantage of new media. Surely to Heaven, the industry could have thought of another business model—after all, these are incredibly bright, incredibly well paid executives and the only thing they could come up with is to sue Granny because her 11 year old granddaughter is upstairs illegally downloading tunes for personal use?
En bas to all of them.
The National Arts Centre Orchestra performed last night as well. It’s a very good outfit. They were terrific in support of other performers. Their work with rock-legend Pag was cool. But if you wanted to showcase their work along with Pag to the world, well, you couldn’t do it (legally) for all the reasons I go into above.
But if you could, I’ll bet we could find a new revenue model that would work just fine…
Why should Google get ALL the money? What if we had a two minute video of Crystal Pite up there on the Internet right now*? What if the SoundBox was where you went for tunes (I admit it, the name sucks)? We could have been Google!
(* Interestingly, Crystal says she misses the fact that, unlike writers say, she will not have any artifacts when her career as a dancer is over. Her performances are, in her words, ephemeral and disappear when she stops performing. But if we go in a new direction taking advantage of new media, she will have lots of artifacts of her work on the Internet: ones that will produce revenue for her too long after her body is no longer capable of the things that she does now.)
Somehow wrap ads in a non intrusive way around your music or videos or photos or power points or web pages, whatever. There will be plenty of money to go around—share it with the artists, the creators, maybe even the viewers…
When you buy a CD, you know that the artists are getting maybe 10 cents to a dollar out of the 20 bucks you fork over. I am sure that creators could do a whole lot better if we torched the middlemen in the deal.
I am hoping to run a national video case study competition for entrepreneurs later on this year. One of the preconditions of entering the competition is that when you upload your videos to our site, you upload on an unlimited creative commons license—it will be completely in the public domain. Professors around the world would then be able to access a video case study library (eventually numbering a few hundred or even thousand video case studies—students these days seem to better relate to and learn from video than purely depending on the written word) and use it to educate their students. Other creators could take snippets of these videos and use them in their own mashups. Whatever they want to do, we will live with it. Unlimited creativity would be encouraged.
Think that is too far out? Well, last night, I heard some great work by Bach, Mendelssohn and other composers. What if their work had never entered the public domain?
To heck with patents, copyright, trademarks and the whole restraint of trade panoply of lawyers and court enforced orders. I am sorry but charging $30 for a lifesaving prescription of drugs in West Africa when generic drug makers can produce the same thing for pennies makes no sense to me. The idea that we are encouraging inventors and creators by giving them monopoly rights on things like drugs, music, films, photos, whatever is baloney in my view.
Ideas should be free.
And don’t tell me that the makers of a drug that ‘cures’ male impotence (and maybe kills you with a heart attack) need patent protection for 17 to 22 years. Come on.
Do you think that creators do things in isolation? Einstein was unimaginably brilliant; the idea that energy and matter are related by the speed of light squared is really strange when you think about it for a few seconds but it is even stranger that someone could figure it out in the first place. But if Einstein hadn’t, there were others who were close and it might have been just a few months longer before someone else would have got it right. We all stand on the shoulders of others who went before us and humanity would be much better off if we recognized this in a new code of law. When you make criminals out of millions of kids, your laws are wrong, just plain worng.
What if the screw cap were not in the public domain? Or the theory of electro-magnetism? Or the founders of the Internet had decided to keep the protocols that run the web, proprietary? The TRILLIONS of dollars of value that the Internet has already created would be diminished and not by a few percentages—it would be incinerated and the world would be a much poorer place, not only in dollar terms but in terms of quality of life.
I would much rather have YouTube or Veoh or GoFish on my TV than the crap that the cable companies and networks serve us—billions of channels by billions of creators. And much more value would get created for everyone; the problem is that the value might get shifted around a bit—from big business to creators and that is what they and their legal teams are afraid of.
Dr. Bruce