Reeves still finds itself shut out from copyright/DRM funding program

A year and several letters of industry support later, Reeves Interactive continues to find itself shut out from the Electronic Copyright Fund (ECF), much to its president’s frustration. The group has been touting its TraceRight digital rights management software as a way to put audio-visual material securely online and is seeking public assistance to do so (CNM, March 21/03). A year after being told by officials at Canadian Heritage’s ECF to win industry support for the project, the company was told again recently that it is ineligible for funding - despite letters of support for the project from most of the collectives in Quebec with their hands in A/V production. Reeves president François Reeves says he’s spent a year on the road presenting the TraceRight product to collectives and companies to build industry momentum and many have provided him with letters of support (see sidebar) backing the initiative, but Heritage officials continue to say the project falls outside the fund’s guidelines. Reeves says he needs public support to proceed with the crucial first step of inputting information from existing and new audio-visual works into the TraceRight central database - a job that will tie up the time of staff at each of the collectives. Without a proven revenue model to justify the use of resources, however, the project will remain mired at the proposal stage without public dollars. Reeves says he’s unconcerned whether money from the ECT is delivered to him or allocated throughout the collectives - just so long as the project can get off the ground. He suggests that money to work with Reeves might be allocated directly to the collectives if that makes Ottawa more comfortable. Without a system such as TraceRight to generate micropayments, the new media industry is missing out on an important opportunity, he argues. "The new media guys are looking for new revenues. This whole thing came about when we started working on Grande Ourse and we were told by CBC that we couldn’t use footage (online) from the actual series. We said why? They said to me that the collectives wouldn’t allow it. So I said that we need a tool to monitor that use. "And that’s how we started drafting the architecture of TraceRight. And that was three years ago and then we started developing it and then we started presenting it to the people that were supposed to be stumbling blocks for putting content online…Young people are spending less and less time in front of the tele-vision…We have the infrastructure to deliver broadband content but we have no rights (management) for A/V content. You can clear pictures, you can clear text. You can clear music. You can’t clear A/V material. It doesn’t make sense." For the time being, Reeves is left to question Heritage officials about why the TraceRight initiative falls outside ECF guidelines. Those guidelines are being rewritten currently by Heritage staff and will be re-released on March 31. Ted Bairstow, head of the Canadian Culture Online Program, which administers the ECF, was unavailable for comment.

Reeves still finds itself shut out from copyright/DRM funding program

Broadcast | March 3, 2004

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us