Understanding Content Regulations and Copyright

Again in this fourth and penultimate video I'm going to go through a series of different content regulations and content regulations are divided into a number of areas. One has to do with domestic and or local content quantitatively and national markets. The other looks at content quality in terms of the nature of the information or the entertainment content itself. We will cover these in some detail starting with copyright which is also a type of ownership regulation as I mentioned in my previous video. Now, corporate legislation regulates media products in order to ensure that they generate as much money as possible to its creator or a media industry, but for a limited time. Copyright first developed in England in the 1600s as a response to the printing press. And the printing press enabled a much larger circulation of reading material that was simply not possible before since everything was copied by hand. And copyright has then come to protect authors. But it was first employed as a concept to control the printing of so-called scandalous books and pamphlets. So in other words, copyright to begin with was actually a type of government censorship. It regulated the printing industry by forcing publishers to be pre-approved by a stationer's company appointed to the task by the state. So the initial copyright just referred to the right to have something printed at all in the first place. But development of copyright laws that do print the creators is fundamentally about the potential to commodify created content. Right. If you commodify something, you know, where you can sell it. So you know when you hear commodify you can think of monetization even though I think monetization is a bad term as a Marxist. It's really quantification right. Quantification means turning something potentially into money right. So copyright then is meant to encourage creators to continue making original works by protecting their sole right to profit from their creations for a number of years. So for the duration of a copyright no one else can make money off of it unless the copyright holder gives permission. So for example, whether music can be played in cafes and malls, used for commercial, sold as an individual commodity and so on. You know, that would be bound by copyright legislation. Now in the 18th century, copyright used to be 25 years before the word passed into the public domain. And obviously when something passes into the public domain, it means that it's a free-for-all. Anyone can use it as they see fit. copyright terms have been extended progressively and this is known sometimes as a so-called Mickey Mouse effect and that is due with basically every time Mickey Mouse is about to pass into public domain this new love is you know the US government and then you know you have a copyright being extended right so this sometimes refers to so-called regulatory capture basically that you know government regulation is more or less captured by heavy lobbying by some firms right but you know Well, as it happens, Disney now could not extend copyright further. So after January 1st of this year, the earliest version of Mickey and Minnie Mouse entered the public domain and can now be used by free for everyone, right? So now in the US basically, copyright is basically the lifetime of you know the creator or author plus 70 years more or less, right? So as a comment Disney reveals, copyright today is primarily held by large media companies rather than the individual creators that are creating work within the media. industries right so they you know when they go to work for someone else you know this is also relation to the political kind of media if you go to work with someone else especially if you do something creative the copyright doesn't say it'll belong to you per se you might have your name attached to it but whether you actually can get remuneration for it depends on the kind of contract you may have then you know written or signed with the media company so a lot of individual creators they sign away the copy right and this is also what academics do when we publish something right so every time I publish a journal article I'm actually signing away my copyright so my name is still recognized as the author but then you have all these private companies who charges ridiculous amounts of money to libraries you know they're actually the ones who are making money off of the work of academics it is a really really strange thing the academic publishing industry right Also, copyright is primarily held by large media companies. It's also suggested that it's a feature of capitalist businesses that what is created during company time more or less belongs to the company. So in the music industry, for example, an artist may sign a contract that gives a record company exclusive copyright, meaning they're the ones who can choose who gets to broadcast it, where it's played and these kind of things, who also gets to print up physical copies and so on. Or they can sign a so-called work for hire contract, meaning that anything they make is owned by the publisher. And some of you may have known, if you're Swifties, that Taylor Swift recently re-recorded her entire music catalog. And she basically did this to regain control over her own music, where it can be used for what reasons, and so on, right? So there are, in copyright, kind of two specific properties related to this. So you have the original kind of creation copyright that you kind of recognize as the one creating it. And then you have the original or master copy copyright. So Taylor Swift had a copyright with other producers and these kind of things. So she did her copyright to her own works, but she didn't own the copyright to the master copy. So by re-recording all her own music, she now controls everything by herself. Now a significant copyright issue currently concerns generative AI and that is that you know Gentile AI has basically been trained on you know what people have written online, they may have been trained on videos, they find online music and so on right so there's a bunch of authors, a bunch of musicians and people in the business like well actually you know OpenAI you have now just stolen all of our intellectual property and you've trained your Gentile AI and whatever they're spinning out now is basically you know uh a version of what we have created. So a lot of artists and authors now actually want to be remunerated by OpenAI and all these other companies that are creating generative AI. Okay so now that more and more content is also delivered digitally, so-called rights management becomes an important element of securing profits for copyright holders. And an example of rights management is known as DRM or digital rights management. And this regulation is a one in all meaning that is an example of actually operational ownership and content regulations. So in essence, DRM is the use of technology to control access to copyrighted material. And DRM can basically be quite granular and manage what users can and cannot do with their content. So, for example, how many devices can they access media on? Can you share it? You know, can you copy text from a PDF? How many times can you play a song? So all these things is what the DRM can limit you to do. So we can say that digital rights management locks up part of the use value, sometimes behind a paywall so you can pay for additional uses. So for example, if you have a PDF that is a complete DRM, you can probably buy a version of the PDF that allows you to copy text from it, edit it, and so on. So proponents of DRM believe that it is a way to protect corporate homes. holders were as opponents argue that DRM inconveniences legitimate uses. So for example way back when they were 2000s if you bought an mp3 file from the now defunct iTunes store that file could only be played with Apple software iTunes or you know on the iPod right. If you try to play the file using any other software it just wouldn't play. But here's the if you had bought the same song or album As a CD you could rip that for your own purposes and then you could play it on any music playing software, right? So in that sense, you know by buying an mp3 from the iTunes Store You could just do less with you know That piece of music than if you actually bought the physical CD and just ripped it right now DRM and also been issue if you're a gamer Some games may not work unless you're connected to the internet, right? If you take a console PC with you to some remote area with wireless, you simply won't be able to play. An early example of rights management of media content before DRM was so-called geographical region locking and this was the case for VHS tape, DVDs and video games. This was possible due to different standards for encoding and decoding video and TV signals. North America relied on a system called NTSC while in Europe we had something called pals. I remember as a young kid I went on a kind of a beach holiday to Florida with my brother and my mother and I found like a bunch of VHSs really really cheap like a couple of dollars. I was very excited even you know bought some like horror stuff that I probably shouldn't be allowed to buy because I was quite young then just 11 or 12. And when I came home I was very very disappointed when I put it in and tried to watch that you know it was just like kind of a gray screen. I could hear everything but I couldn't watch anything and that had to do with the fact that I was trying to play. on NTSC encoded video on a PAL TV set and a PAL VHS player. Now, Copper Left is kind of a version of copyright that is trying to just be really, really permissive. So it's something called Creative Commons. So in a sense, it's like, hey, you are free to use this more or less as you wish, although there are certain different licenses with Creative Commons. So, for example, the Creative Commons, it's okay to use it as long as you're not trying to profit off of it, right? Whereas if you then try to profit off of it, then you would have to actually ask permission to do that. You have also something called the GPL, which is the GNU General Public License. And that's like another version of Creative Commons, but specifically tied to software and I think Linux in particular. Now, quantitative content regulations. is a big issue here and this is where you're going to get into a can con and these kind of things. So last we covered some implications of media conglomeration noting that there was a reduction of diversity and also that there was a general cultural sameness being some of the consequences of large media corporations more or less owning anything and then also trying to just you know reduce the risk right. Now quantitative content regulations can help with the reduction of diversity, perhaps less so with cultural sameness though. Now if you have traveled a bit or a lot and you have watched Netflix in different countries you maybe noticed that you can't always access the same shows and movies in different places and this has to do with content licensing and how it is labeled. Many of the programs that are banned as Netflix originals in Canada are actually not made by Netflix as original programming that they take a financial risk on like Stranger Things. So-called Netflix originals like Better Call Saul are actually properties paid for and commissioned by production companies in other countries. But Netflix then acquires the right to distribute them internationally and this is quite common with many UK, Korean, Indian or Norwegian shows. Even Canadian content like Orphan Black is also labeled as Netflix originals although obviously in other markets than in Canada. Now one of the reasons why Netflix decided to brutally integrate by investing in its own content production is to avoid licensing issues. Because licensing basically restricts its access to content from market to market. It is typically also for a limited time right now. Obviously their own shows, Netflix's own shows, can also be pushed to their subscribers worldwide and that's actually a lot easier to deal with. You know all types of different licenses that you can show one show in Canada, you can't show it in Norway, but you can show it in Uganda or these kind of things. Just to take a recent example, I'm a fan of the show Welcome to Rexham, it's basically it's, what's his name, Deadpool and a guy from it's all of a sudden in Philadelphia, Ryan Reynolds, right? That's one of them and I can't remember the other guy, sorry about that, but they basically bought a Welsh football team. this kind of show just follows, you know, how they've improved both the city and, you know, how the football team now has been promoted a couple of times. So I watched the first two seasons on Disney+, and when season three started early summer I couldn't find it there. You know, why? Because City TV had the license to broadcast it in Canada. Only when the entire season was done was it actually put on Disney+, and that's when I ended up watching it. Now, culture protectionism is also a problem. quantitative content regulations. And they refer to regulations that require a certain amount of programming content in a given country's media industries. And you know not just any, that content has to be made in or by the country or by one of its citizens. And this concerns fairs about cultural imperialism which I'm going to deal with when we hopefully meet next. So Cultural protectionism is really not a big issue in the US where it would be hard to find programming that is not made in the US or by a US citizen. But this is an issue in almost any other country in the world due to the dominance of US-made media content. That's especially the case in Canada since we share a pretty long border with the US. It is also a concern in any country. that has a hybrid media system that is tipped more towards the commercial side rather than public service broadcasting. Next thing, US media content is really cheap to acquire, right? Because as long as a US, you know, TV production house has created something, right? Like it doesn't cost anything to just copy that and air it in a different country, right? So it is a lot cheaper to just, you know, buy, you know, US media content than to make original programming, whether in Canada or in parts of the world, right? So once content is produced, you can just distribute to another country and can sell it over and over with very minimal cost. It's just extra profits, right? Because costs were typically already recuperated in the domestic market. And if costs weren't recuperated in the domestic market, then actually selling it abroad might make it profitable in the first place. So regulations are therefore needed in order to require licensed radio and TV stations to carry a certain amount of domestic and local content in a given area as possible. And we can therefore also refer to these as a type of economic protectionism and or development. Why? Because if you ensure that there are, you know, say Canadian producers producing content, right, you also stimulate production of local cultural content. and that could have a positive effect obviously on the economy too. It ensures that funding is available to support domestic media content production. Now there also used to be regulations in many countries across the world concerning how used movies could be screened in theaters and this was so-called screen quotas. So a certain percentage of movies must be domestic or only a certain number of movies shown monthly and annually can be foreign. Okay so I mentioned CanCon couple of times you know and I'm going to turn to this now and you really need to know CanCon right and the reason why we can't comment is that Canada is neighbor the US and the US you know just makes a lot of media content and they're also globally dominant. It's the thing broadcast they don't really respect national borders same thing the internet it doesn't care about where we are in the world right. So it is national cultural policy to protect Canadian identity from the perceived threat of US popular culture news and so on right. So for example, Canadians seem to know a lot more about elections in the US than in Canada. And I must say, even though I'm not Canadian, I've lived there for such a long time, but it still feels like I always know a lot more about what is happening in the US than what's actually happening in Canada. This is something I try to rectify by actually starting to read a lot more Norwegian, sorry not Norwegian, a lot more Canadian news and watch more Canadian news on TV. Anyway, the set of rules governing Canadian content are a subsection of CRTC regulations, and they determine the annual and daily percentage or quota of how much programming must be Canadian. And current Canadian content percentages for broadcast TV are as follows. At least 55% of all programming aired annually by broadcast television stations, and at least 50% of programming aired daily from 6 pm to midnight must be Canadian content. And the CBC is regulated heavily. The CBC has to have a 60% CanCon quota. Now, an issue though with quantitative content regulations is that they have been filled with low budget programming options like talk shows, reality TV and entertainment news. So you can make crap Canadian non-scripted shows or make Canadian versions of popular reality TV shows like, you know, The Amazing Race, you get The Amazing Race Canada, you have American Idol. get Canadian Idol, you have MasterChef, then you get MasterChef Canada and so on. And this is just far far cheaper than making actual scripted TV that requires writers and you know rounds of writing and so on and so forth. Now the CBC is a bit different since they you know it's their mission to also you know commission a certain amount of original scripted Canadian TV. So for example Schitt's Creek, Being Erica and Kim's Convenience are good examples of that. For broadcast radio 40% has to actually be Canadian content but with some partial exceptions for some specialty formats like classical music. One issue though with CanCon is how do you actually determine what makes content Canadian? So let's look at how this is determined in music and then we are referring to the so-called maple rules right so some people clearly had a lot of fun coming up with this right. So before the Maple system was established in 1971, Canadian music was regarded with indifference by Canadian radio. During the 1960s, Canadian radio was just dominated by British or American acts. And that was a major hurdle for Canadian musicians because they just could not gain attention in their home country unless they had a hit single in the US or Europe first. So Maple was a way to deal with this and is also a subset of CanCon. So Maple, as you see on the slide. is an acronym for Music, Artist, Performance and Lyrics. So this is what helps us determine what is actually Canadian right. So for music to be qualified as Canadian content first music the music is composed entirely by Canadian or the music is or the lyrics are performed principally by a Canadian artist you know this artist or performance music that is recorded completely in Canada or performed completely in Canada and broadcast live in Canada or the lyrics are written entirely by a Canadian. You know what I've said is taken from the CRTC website and you can click on the link here and that also defines what is meant by Canadian. So for example I'm not a Canadian citizen but since I have permanent residency if I made a hit song it would be qualified as Canadian content. Okay, so moving on from quantitative content regulations onto qualitative content regulations. And they address quality standards in terms of what can be said and shown on radio, TV, and in video games. It also covers explicit language and popular music. And these policies vary from country to country and can change over time in accordance with social norms. So for example in Norway we actually had a blasphemy law. Which meant that the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian was banned when it came out in the 1970s And weirdly enough we had this law as late as 2015 although since the 1980s nothing else has been banned due to being blasphemous But you know, I'm not sure whether The Life of Brian was ever actually shown in theaters in Norway Although we could definitely get VHS copies of it when I was a kid. It's a hilarious movie if you haven't watched it the first category of qualitative content regulations has to do with the pursuit of truth and of ensuring that the information provided to the audience is accurate. So all these things that are on this slide here, I'm actually going to go through them step by step. So first we are going to talk about defamation. And defamation is divided into libel, which refers to any defamation done in writing. And then you have slander, that is defamation, you know, based on speech. And defamation broadly referred to publicly circulating untruths that would harm someone's reputation. And a somewhat recent example, even though a couple years old, was the Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard trial. And Heard was sued and convicted for libel for penning an op-ed published in the Washington Post in which she wrote about her experience of domestic and sexual abuse, although she did not name Depp. in libel cases truth is the best defense if you're publishing things like this and someone's coming for you. This is why Heard lost her case because she couldn't actually prove that this actually happened. I've watched some of the trial it was pretty clear that both Depp and Heard are abusers themselves. None of them came out of that looking good. Now you see here a picture of Kendrick Lamar dropping A minor which is just said before doing hopscotch here. I'm sure most of you have heard you know, not like us, you know, this kind of big hit over the summer. And as you know, he calls Drake, you know, a certified pedophile and in general repeats that he is interested in minors and, you know, he just has so many ways of saying, you know, Drake likes, you know, younger people basically, right. Now I'm not sure if this is slander since Lamar says this or if this could also be a libel if the lyrics have been published, right. But what surprised me is that, you know, so far at least, Drake has not taken any legal action at all, right? Truth is the best defense in cases like this, you know, so I'm just saying here. I'm pretty weird, you know, Drake says like, haha, I don't have a legitimate daughter, but he hasn't come out saying any of these other things, right? Anyway, even though... Truth is the best defense in cases when it comes to defamation. There are certain jurisdictions, and here I'm thinking in particular of Japan, where you could be convicted for defamation even if what you said or wrote was factual. Now, fair comment is a related comment concept or fair use that pertains to news agencies and the reporting or editorializing on public persons. So it's believed to be in the public interest to get information out about people with a high public profile. This protects media to publish opinions without fear of defamation suits. The other aspect related to accurate information concerns fake news. As of now, there are no regulations or laws against fake news or false information specifically, although we do have that for false advertising. But part of the reason why there aren't any laws dealing with fake news or disinformation, even though there is that in the European Union, it is due to affairs of government censorship, right? In particular, the problems of determining intent and who decides between what is true and actually what is false, right? So there would be just a lot of court cases determining, you know, what is actually true or what is, you know, what is false, right? And you don't really want to lead that up to the government, especially, you know, if they have particular ideological convictions, right? Earlier this year the Liberal government introduced Bill C-63 which is referred to as online harms bill and that has come in fight precisely due to fears about government censorship and as I said I'm going to link to a few resources concerning this bill because I think this is something that everyone should know about. In a bill proposing to deal with fake news and disinformation would likely be seen as even more heavy-handed than Bill C-63 has been criticized by various NGOs and businesses here in Kerala. Left the media organization to self-regulate, had to keep journalistic values like fact checking, objectivity and so on. That's where we basically are right? So since the government is not stepping in then you know it's basically up to media organizations to do this. So even though you have big media organizations that do fact check and these kind of things, there are also more unserious players that don't really give a crap about anything like that and are more than happy to just spread fake news and false information you know think about long tabloids. So like Breitbart and these kind of things, you know, they're more than willing to do it. And just think about, you know, all the stuff that you will see on social media obviously. And in the US you can actually broadcast fake news, you know, for example Fox, you know, they actually won a court case where they say they are actually only providing entertainment and that no reasonable person should take what, for example, you know, their pundits say as factual because they say that we are just providing entertainment and this has been clarified even in a court of law. Now another category of qualitative content regulations involve moral questions and these concern what kind of content we as a society think are suitable for people to see or hear. There has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of TV about its corrupting influences, in particular depictions of sex and violence and related language. And we'll talk about some of these effects on content, on audience in the lecture after the reading break. Now community standards involved what is considered socially acceptable to broadcast in a particular historical moment. Notable examples include controversial subjects where social opinions have changed over time. For example, at one point they didn't really show what to speak about divorce. You know, no, it certainly didn't include abortion or LGBTQ plus issues, right? You know, blasphemy from, an example from Norway is another example of managing morality, you know, we can say a pearl clutchie. kind of issues. Appropriateness. So the bar for judging the standard of appropriateness tends to involve around the potential impact of programming the children. So this typically concerns content that is violent, contains profanity or is sexually explicit. What this means in regulation terms is that there are often stricter rules in TV broadcasting for programs that are so-called pre-watershed. And pre-watershed is the industry term for the time children are meant to have gone to bed. and that differs from country to country. In Canada that is seen as 9 pm, in the US it's 10 pm, and other countries that might be earlier or later. But after this and until children get up in the morning, usually set at 6 am, programming for mature audiences can be aired. Okay, censorship and self-regulation. Interestingly, most censorship in the mass media is usually a form of self-censorship because governments, especially in the Western world, don't really want to be accused of censoring. in the name of free speech. So media companies then decide to act proactively in order to either avoid being too heavily regulated by the government or audience or advertiser boycotts, you know, hence why we have this parental warnings. So for example you will hear F-bombs on HBO shows because that is funded by subscription rather than ads, but it's a different case when it comes to sort of broadcasts, right? So you won't hear that on a show like Abbott Elementary, which is an ad-supported show on the network channel ABC that is owned by Disney. There are often fines involved in breaking network rules on sex and violence. So networks will fine the producers of the show, right? And they do this because the networks are trying to attract the broadest audience possible and not interested in alienating viewers or advertisers. So there are content warnings for, you know, profanity, scenes of unsmoking, light nudity, and so on and so forth. These are messages that you now see at the beginning of a TV show. You know, there are basically a form of self-regulation to notify the viewer that this is what to expect. And I think some of these things are a bit perplexing. You know, since I'm smoking profanity and nudity, why is this an issue at all? It's just facts of life basically. Content warning labels represent various media industries regulating their own products for consumers, but they didn't just decide to do that on their own. Each of the labels have their own history in terms of the tensions that led the media industry in question to self-censor. And on the slide you can see the various age rating system that explains what the ratings are and a bit of the history. If you want to take a closer look at one, I recommend that you watch this video from Box. I will see if I can also embed this into the video right below this one. It's a 20 minute video explaining why we now have this label and this is often related to the satanic panic. There's also some kind of veiled racism in there too. The video also reveals the tension that spurred on the self-regulation, the moral panic at the time and so on. So it's quite in-depth and I just don't have time to go through it myself. Okay that's the end of this video and the final video I'm going to speak specifically about two bills, bill c11 and the online news act which is bill c18.

We will cover these in some detail starting with copyright which is also a type of ownership regulation as I mentioned in my previous video. Now, corporate legislation regulates media products in order to ensure that they generate as much money as possible to its creator or a media industry, but for a limited time. Copyright first developed in England in the 1600s as a response to the printing press.

And the printing press enabled a much larger circulation of reading material that was simply not possible before since everything was copied by hand. And copyright has then come to protect authors. But it was first employed as a concept to control the printing of so-called scandalous books and pamphlets. So in other words, copyright to begin with was actually a type of government censorship.

It regulated the printing industry by forcing publishers to be pre-approved by a stationer's company appointed to the task by the state. So the initial copyright just referred to the right to have something printed at all in the first place. But development of copyright laws that do print the creators is fundamentally about the potential to commodify created content. Right. If you commodify something, you know, where you can sell it.

So you know when you hear commodify you can think of monetization even though I think monetization is a bad term as a Marxist. It's really quantification right. Quantification means turning something potentially into money right.

So copyright then is meant to encourage creators to continue making original works by protecting their sole right to profit from their creations for a number of years. So for the duration of a copyright no one else can make money off of it unless the copyright holder gives permission. So for example, whether music can be played in cafes and malls, used for commercial, sold as an individual commodity and so on. You know, that would be bound by copyright legislation. Now in the 18th century, copyright used to be 25 years before the word passed into the public domain.

And obviously when something passes into the public domain, it means that it's a free-for-all. Anyone can use it as they see fit. copyright terms have been extended progressively and this is known sometimes as a so-called Mickey Mouse effect and that is due with basically every time Mickey Mouse is about to pass into public domain this new love is you know the US government and then you know you have a copyright being extended right so this sometimes refers to so-called regulatory capture basically that you know government regulation is more or less captured by heavy lobbying by some firms right but you know Well, as it happens, Disney now could not extend copyright further.

So after January 1st of this year, the earliest version of Mickey and Minnie Mouse entered the public domain and can now be used by free for everyone, right? So now in the US basically, copyright is basically the lifetime of you know the creator or author plus 70 years more or less, right? So as a comment Disney reveals, copyright today is primarily held by large media companies rather than the individual creators that are creating work within the media. industries right so they you know when they go to work for someone else you know this is also relation to the political kind of media if you go to work with someone else especially if you do something creative the copyright doesn't say it'll belong to you per se you might have your name attached to it but whether you actually can get remuneration for it depends on the kind of contract you may have then you know written or signed with the media company so a lot of individual creators they sign away the copy right and this is also what academics do when we publish something right so every time I publish a journal article I'm actually signing away my copyright so my name is still recognized as the author but then you have all these private companies who charges ridiculous amounts of money to libraries you know they're actually the ones who are making money off of the work of academics it is a really really strange thing the academic publishing industry right Also, copyright is primarily held by large media companies.

It's also suggested that it's a feature of capitalist businesses that what is created during company time more or less belongs to the company. So in the music industry, for example, an artist may sign a contract that gives a record company exclusive copyright, meaning they're the ones who can choose who gets to broadcast it, where it's played and these kind of things, who also gets to print up physical copies and so on. Or they can sign a so-called work for hire contract, meaning that anything they make is owned by the publisher. And some of you may have known, if you're Swifties, that Taylor Swift recently re-recorded her entire music catalog. And she basically did this to regain control over her own music, where it can be used for what reasons, and so on, right?

So there are, in copyright, kind of two specific properties related to this. So you have the original kind of creation copyright that you kind of recognize as the one creating it. And then you have the original or master copy copyright. So Taylor Swift had a copyright with other producers and these kind of things.

So she did her copyright to her own works, but she didn't own the copyright to the master copy. So by re-recording all her own music, she now controls everything by herself. Now a significant copyright issue currently concerns generative AI and that is that you know Gentile AI has basically been trained on you know what people have written online, they may have been trained on videos, they find online music and so on right so there's a bunch of authors, a bunch of musicians and people in the business like well actually you know OpenAI you have now just stolen all of our intellectual property and you've trained your Gentile AI and whatever they're spinning out now is basically you know uh a version of what we have created.

So a lot of artists and authors now actually want to be remunerated by OpenAI and all these other companies that are creating generative AI. Okay so now that more and more content is also delivered digitally, so-called rights management becomes an important element of securing profits for copyright holders. And an example of rights management is known as DRM or digital rights management.

And this regulation is a one in all meaning that is an example of actually operational ownership and content regulations. So in essence, DRM is the use of technology to control access to copyrighted material. And DRM can basically be quite granular and manage what users can and cannot do with their content. So, for example, how many devices can they access media on?

Can you share it? You know, can you copy text from a PDF? How many times can you play a song? So all these things is what the DRM can limit you to do. So we can say that digital rights management locks up part of the use value, sometimes behind a paywall so you can pay for additional uses.

So for example, if you have a PDF that is a complete DRM, you can probably buy a version of the PDF that allows you to copy text from it, edit it, and so on. So proponents of DRM believe that it is a way to protect corporate homes. holders were as opponents argue that DRM inconveniences legitimate uses.

So for example way back when they were 2000s if you bought an mp3 file from the now defunct iTunes store that file could only be played with Apple software iTunes or you know on the iPod right. If you try to play the file using any other software it just wouldn't play. But here's the if you had bought the same song or album As a CD you could rip that for your own purposes and then you could play it on any music playing software, right?

So in that sense, you know by buying an mp3 from the iTunes Store You could just do less with you know That piece of music than if you actually bought the physical CD and just ripped it right now DRM and also been issue if you're a gamer Some games may not work unless you're connected to the internet, right? If you take a console PC with you to some remote area with wireless, you simply won't be able to play. An early example of rights management of media content before DRM was so-called geographical region locking and this was the case for VHS tape, DVDs and video games.

This was possible due to different standards for encoding and decoding video and TV signals. North America relied on a system called NTSC while in Europe we had something called pals. I remember as a young kid I went on a kind of a beach holiday to Florida with my brother and my mother and I found like a bunch of VHSs really really cheap like a couple of dollars. I was very excited even you know bought some like horror stuff that I probably shouldn't be allowed to buy because I was quite young then just 11 or 12. And when I came home I was very very disappointed when I put it in and tried to watch that you know it was just like kind of a gray screen.

I could hear everything but I couldn't watch anything and that had to do with the fact that I was trying to play. on NTSC encoded video on a PAL TV set and a PAL VHS player. Now, Copper Left is kind of a version of copyright that is trying to just be really, really permissive. So it's something called Creative Commons. So in a sense, it's like, hey, you are free to use this more or less as you wish, although there are certain different licenses with Creative Commons.

So, for example, the Creative Commons, it's okay to use it as long as you're not trying to profit off of it, right? Whereas if you then try to profit off of it, then you would have to actually ask permission to do that. You have also something called the GPL, which is the GNU General Public License.

And that's like another version of Creative Commons, but specifically tied to software and I think Linux in particular. Now, quantitative content regulations. is a big issue here and this is where you're going to get into a can con and these kind of things. So last we covered some implications of media conglomeration noting that there was a reduction of diversity and also that there was a general cultural sameness being some of the consequences of large media corporations more or less owning anything and then also trying to just you know reduce the risk right.

Now quantitative content regulations can help with the reduction of diversity, perhaps less so with cultural sameness though. Now if you have traveled a bit or a lot and you have watched Netflix in different countries you maybe noticed that you can't always access the same shows and movies in different places and this has to do with content licensing and how it is labeled. Many of the programs that are banned as Netflix originals in Canada are actually not made by Netflix as original programming that they take a financial risk on like Stranger Things.

So-called Netflix originals like Better Call Saul are actually properties paid for and commissioned by production companies in other countries. But Netflix then acquires the right to distribute them internationally and this is quite common with many UK, Korean, Indian or Norwegian shows. Even Canadian content like Orphan Black is also labeled as Netflix originals although obviously in other markets than in Canada.

Now one of the reasons why Netflix decided to brutally integrate by investing in its own content production is to avoid licensing issues. Because licensing basically restricts its access to content from market to market. It is typically also for a limited time right now. Obviously their own shows, Netflix's own shows, can also be pushed to their subscribers worldwide and that's actually a lot easier to deal with. You know all types of different licenses that you can show one show in Canada, you can't show it in Norway, but you can show it in Uganda or these kind of things.

Just to take a recent example, I'm a fan of the show Welcome to Rexham, it's basically it's, what's his name, Deadpool and a guy from it's all of a sudden in Philadelphia, Ryan Reynolds, right? That's one of them and I can't remember the other guy, sorry about that, but they basically bought a Welsh football team. this kind of show just follows, you know, how they've improved both the city and, you know, how the football team now has been promoted a couple of times.

So I watched the first two seasons on Disney+, and when season three started early summer I couldn't find it there. You know, why? Because City TV had the license to broadcast it in Canada.

Only when the entire season was done was it actually put on Disney+, and that's when I ended up watching it. Now, culture protectionism is also a problem. quantitative content regulations. And they refer to regulations that require a certain amount of programming content in a given country's media industries.

And you know not just any, that content has to be made in or by the country or by one of its citizens. And this concerns fairs about cultural imperialism which I'm going to deal with when we hopefully meet next. So Cultural protectionism is really not a big issue in the US where it would be hard to find programming that is not made in the US or by a US citizen. But this is an issue in almost any other country in the world due to the dominance of US-made media content. That's especially the case in Canada since we share a pretty long border with the US.

It is also a concern in any country. that has a hybrid media system that is tipped more towards the commercial side rather than public service broadcasting. Next thing, US media content is really cheap to acquire, right?

Because as long as a US, you know, TV production house has created something, right? Like it doesn't cost anything to just copy that and air it in a different country, right? So it is a lot cheaper to just, you know, buy, you know, US media content than to make original programming, whether in Canada or in parts of the world, right? So once content is produced, you can just distribute to another country and can sell it over and over with very minimal cost. It's just extra profits, right?

Because costs were typically already recuperated in the domestic market. And if costs weren't recuperated in the domestic market, then actually selling it abroad might make it profitable in the first place. So regulations are therefore needed in order to require licensed radio and TV stations to carry a certain amount of domestic and local content in a given area as possible.

And we can therefore also refer to these as a type of economic protectionism and or development. Why? Because if you ensure that there are, you know, say Canadian producers producing content, right, you also stimulate production of local cultural content.

and that could have a positive effect obviously on the economy too. It ensures that funding is available to support domestic media content production. Now there also used to be regulations in many countries across the world concerning how used movies could be screened in theaters and this was so-called screen quotas.

So a certain percentage of movies must be domestic or only a certain number of movies shown monthly and annually can be foreign. Okay so I mentioned CanCon couple of times you know and I'm going to turn to this now and you really need to know CanCon right and the reason why we can't comment is that Canada is neighbor the US and the US you know just makes a lot of media content and they're also globally dominant. It's the thing broadcast they don't really respect national borders same thing the internet it doesn't care about where we are in the world right. So it is national cultural policy to protect Canadian identity from the perceived threat of US popular culture news and so on right.

So for example, Canadians seem to know a lot more about elections in the US than in Canada. And I must say, even though I'm not Canadian, I've lived there for such a long time, but it still feels like I always know a lot more about what is happening in the US than what's actually happening in Canada. This is something I try to rectify by actually starting to read a lot more Norwegian, sorry not Norwegian, a lot more Canadian news and watch more Canadian news on TV. Anyway, the set of rules governing Canadian content are a subsection of CRTC regulations, and they determine the annual and daily percentage or quota of how much programming must be Canadian. And current Canadian content percentages for broadcast TV are as follows.

At least 55% of all programming aired annually by broadcast television stations, and at least 50% of programming aired daily from 6 pm to midnight must be Canadian content. And the CBC is regulated heavily. The CBC has to have a 60% CanCon quota. Now, an issue though with quantitative content regulations is that they have been filled with low budget programming options like talk shows, reality TV and entertainment news. So you can make crap Canadian non-scripted shows or make Canadian versions of popular reality TV shows like, you know, The Amazing Race, you get The Amazing Race Canada, you have American Idol.

get Canadian Idol, you have MasterChef, then you get MasterChef Canada and so on. And this is just far far cheaper than making actual scripted TV that requires writers and you know rounds of writing and so on and so forth. Now the CBC is a bit different since they you know it's their mission to also you know commission a certain amount of original scripted Canadian TV. So for example Schitt's Creek, Being Erica and Kim's Convenience are good examples of that. For broadcast radio 40% has to actually be Canadian content but with some partial exceptions for some specialty formats like classical music.

One issue though with CanCon is how do you actually determine what makes content Canadian? So let's look at how this is determined in music and then we are referring to the so-called maple rules right so some people clearly had a lot of fun coming up with this right. So before the Maple system was established in 1971, Canadian music was regarded with indifference by Canadian radio. During the 1960s, Canadian radio was just dominated by British or American acts.

And that was a major hurdle for Canadian musicians because they just could not gain attention in their home country unless they had a hit single in the US or Europe first. So Maple was a way to deal with this and is also a subset of CanCon. So Maple, as you see on the slide.

is an acronym for Music, Artist, Performance and Lyrics. So this is what helps us determine what is actually Canadian right. So for music to be qualified as Canadian content first music the music is composed entirely by Canadian or the music is or the lyrics are performed principally by a Canadian artist you know this artist or performance music that is recorded completely in Canada or performed completely in Canada and broadcast live in Canada or the lyrics are written entirely by a Canadian.

You know what I've said is taken from the CRTC website and you can click on the link here and that also defines what is meant by Canadian. So for example I'm not a Canadian citizen but since I have permanent residency if I made a hit song it would be qualified as Canadian content. Okay, so moving on from quantitative content regulations onto qualitative content regulations. And they address quality standards in terms of what can be said and shown on radio, TV, and in video games.

It also covers explicit language and popular music. And these policies vary from country to country and can change over time in accordance with social norms. So for example in Norway we actually had a blasphemy law. Which meant that the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian was banned when it came out in the 1970s And weirdly enough we had this law as late as 2015 although since the 1980s nothing else has been banned due to being blasphemous But you know, I'm not sure whether The Life of Brian was ever actually shown in theaters in Norway Although we could definitely get VHS copies of it when I was a kid.

It's a hilarious movie if you haven't watched it the first category of qualitative content regulations has to do with the pursuit of truth and of ensuring that the information provided to the audience is accurate. So all these things that are on this slide here, I'm actually going to go through them step by step. So first we are going to talk about defamation. And defamation is divided into libel, which refers to any defamation done in writing.

And then you have slander, that is defamation, you know, based on speech. And defamation broadly referred to publicly circulating untruths that would harm someone's reputation. And a somewhat recent example, even though a couple years old, was the Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard trial. And Heard was sued and convicted for libel for penning an op-ed published in the Washington Post in which she wrote about her experience of domestic and sexual abuse, although she did not name Depp.

in libel cases truth is the best defense if you're publishing things like this and someone's coming for you. This is why Heard lost her case because she couldn't actually prove that this actually happened. I've watched some of the trial it was pretty clear that both Depp and Heard are abusers themselves. None of them came out of that looking good. Now you see here a picture of Kendrick Lamar dropping A minor which is just said before doing hopscotch here.

I'm sure most of you have heard you know, not like us, you know, this kind of big hit over the summer. And as you know, he calls Drake, you know, a certified pedophile and in general repeats that he is interested in minors and, you know, he just has so many ways of saying, you know, Drake likes, you know, younger people basically, right. Now I'm not sure if this is slander since Lamar says this or if this could also be a libel if the lyrics have been published, right. But what surprised me is that, you know, so far at least, Drake has not taken any legal action at all, right? Truth is the best defense in cases like this, you know, so I'm just saying here.

I'm pretty weird, you know, Drake says like, haha, I don't have a legitimate daughter, but he hasn't come out saying any of these other things, right? Anyway, even though... Truth is the best defense in cases when it comes to defamation. There are certain jurisdictions, and here I'm thinking in particular of Japan, where you could be convicted for defamation even if what you said or wrote was factual. Now, fair comment is a related comment concept or fair use that pertains to news agencies and the reporting or editorializing on public persons.

So it's believed to be in the public interest to get information out about people with a high public profile. This protects media to publish opinions without fear of defamation suits. The other aspect related to accurate information concerns fake news. As of now, there are no regulations or laws against fake news or false information specifically, although we do have that for false advertising.

But part of the reason why there aren't any laws dealing with fake news or disinformation, even though there is that in the European Union, it is due to affairs of government censorship, right? In particular, the problems of determining intent and who decides between what is true and actually what is false, right? So there would be just a lot of court cases determining, you know, what is actually true or what is, you know, what is false, right? And you don't really want to lead that up to the government, especially, you know, if they have particular ideological convictions, right?

Earlier this year the Liberal government introduced Bill C-63 which is referred to as online harms bill and that has come in fight precisely due to fears about government censorship and as I said I'm going to link to a few resources concerning this bill because I think this is something that everyone should know about. In a bill proposing to deal with fake news and disinformation would likely be seen as even more heavy-handed than Bill C-63 has been criticized by various NGOs and businesses here in Kerala. Left the media organization to self-regulate, had to keep journalistic values like fact checking, objectivity and so on. That's where we basically are right?

So since the government is not stepping in then you know it's basically up to media organizations to do this. So even though you have big media organizations that do fact check and these kind of things, there are also more unserious players that don't really give a crap about anything like that and are more than happy to just spread fake news and false information you know think about long tabloids. So like Breitbart and these kind of things, you know, they're more than willing to do it. And just think about, you know, all the stuff that you will see on social media obviously.

And in the US you can actually broadcast fake news, you know, for example Fox, you know, they actually won a court case where they say they are actually only providing entertainment and that no reasonable person should take what, for example, you know, their pundits say as factual because they say that we are just providing entertainment and this has been clarified even in a court of law. Now another category of qualitative content regulations involve moral questions and these concern what kind of content we as a society think are suitable for people to see or hear. There has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of TV about its corrupting influences, in particular depictions of sex and violence and related language. And we'll talk about some of these effects on content, on audience in the lecture after the reading break. Now community standards involved what is considered socially acceptable to broadcast in a particular historical moment.

Notable examples include controversial subjects where social opinions have changed over time. For example, at one point they didn't really show what to speak about divorce. You know, no, it certainly didn't include abortion or LGBTQ plus issues, right?

You know, blasphemy from, an example from Norway is another example of managing morality, you know, we can say a pearl clutchie. kind of issues. Appropriateness. So the bar for judging the standard of appropriateness tends to involve around the potential impact of programming the children.

So this typically concerns content that is violent, contains profanity or is sexually explicit. What this means in regulation terms is that there are often stricter rules in TV broadcasting for programs that are so-called pre-watershed. And pre-watershed is the industry term for the time children are meant to have gone to bed. and that differs from country to country.

In Canada that is seen as 9 pm, in the US it's 10 pm, and other countries that might be earlier or later. But after this and until children get up in the morning, usually set at 6 am, programming for mature audiences can be aired. Okay, censorship and self-regulation.

Interestingly, most censorship in the mass media is usually a form of self-censorship because governments, especially in the Western world, don't really want to be accused of censoring. in the name of free speech. So media companies then decide to act proactively in order to either avoid being too heavily regulated by the government or audience or advertiser boycotts, you know, hence why we have this parental warnings. So for example you will hear F-bombs on HBO shows because that is funded by subscription rather than ads, but it's a different case when it comes to sort of broadcasts, right?

So you won't hear that on a show like Abbott Elementary, which is an ad-supported show on the network channel ABC that is owned by Disney. There are often fines involved in breaking network rules on sex and violence. So networks will fine the producers of the show, right?

And they do this because the networks are trying to attract the broadest audience possible and not interested in alienating viewers or advertisers. So there are content warnings for, you know, profanity, scenes of unsmoking, light nudity, and so on and so forth. These are messages that you now see at the beginning of a TV show.

You know, there are basically a form of self-regulation to notify the viewer that this is what to expect. And I think some of these things are a bit perplexing. You know, since I'm smoking profanity and nudity, why is this an issue at all?

It's just facts of life basically. Content warning labels represent various media industries regulating their own products for consumers, but they didn't just decide to do that on their own. Each of the labels have their own history in terms of the tensions that led the media industry in question to self-censor.

And on the slide you can see the various age rating system that explains what the ratings are and a bit of the history. If you want to take a closer look at one, I recommend that you watch this video from Box. I will see if I can also embed this into the video right below this one. It's a 20 minute video explaining why we now have this label and this is often related to the satanic panic.

There's also some kind of veiled racism in there too. The video also reveals the tension that spurred on the self-regulation, the moral panic at the time and so on. So it's quite in-depth and I just don't have time to go through it myself.

Okay that's the end of this video and the final video I'm going to speak specifically about two bills, bill c11 and the online news act which is bill c18.

Transcript for:Understanding Content Regulations and Copyright

Transcript for:
Understanding Content Regulations and Copyright