Carleton U professor says Bill C-2 restricts viewing choices of Canadians

Carleton University mass communications professor Paul Attallah says that Bill C-2, which proposes to amend the Radiocommunication Act to tighten penalties for satellite TV signal theft, is a bad piece of legislation. In an interview with Zoran Vidic for Canadian Communications Reports, he states the bill will restrict the viewing choices of Canadians. Why do you think that the Bill C-2, if passed, will limit our choice? The spirit behind C-2 says basically that you cannot choose your signal provider. That signal provider would be chosen for you. We have Bell ExpressVu and Star Choice, the only two authorized providers. If they choose not to provide certain types of signals, as they have already declared they will do, they are empowered and given privilege and authority to determine what I may or may not see, and therefore, what I may or may not know. That is a cultural authority - an authority to shape culture far beyond what any Canadian would agree to give a corporation. Authorized satellite TV signal providers claim that they’re losing $400 million annually to satellite TV signal theft, which involves about 700,000 Canadians. What are your thoughts on that? I’d say that’s a junk statistic. Has that statistic ever been verified independently? Where’s this statistic coming from? Let’s compare it to a very interesting study done recently by the Harvard Business School on the impact of the downloading of MP3 files. What the study found is that the downloading of MP3 files is having a negligible economic impact. Now, downloading MP3 files is lot easier than subscribing to a grey market satellite TV service, and a lot more widespread. So, if downloading MP3 files, according to an objective Harvard University, is negligible, why would I believe that a much smaller phenomenon - the grey and black satellite TV markets - are having this gigantic economic impact? It doesn’t sound believable to me. I think it’s a figure of convenience. If satellite companies have problems with people hacking into their system, why don’t they try and improve the security of their systems? They can’t they buy more up-to-date technology? They’re business people; let them figure out how to run their businesses. Don’t let them make cultural policy. Some ethnic communities have expressed concerns that making the grey satellite TV market illegal would have a significant impact on their cultures. Concern on the part of ethnic communities is totally justified, and it is the behaviour of the signal providers that drives ethnic communities into the grey and black satellite TV markets, because they can’t get the signals from any other source. This is just another example of cultural authority - to be able to determine that an entire ethnic group will or will not have access to this type of content. It has an impact on the ethnic communities. It’s like we say: ‘Welcome to Canada! You can’t speak your language, you have no access to your culture, and, what’s more, our only authorized provider of TV services refuses to make an effort to supply the TV (programming) because, basically, you’re not valuable. I can’t imagine a worse thing to say to the people who come to live in Canada, thinking that it’s going to be a better place than where they used to live. It’s high-handed, it’s arrogant, and it flies in the face of anything we say about ourselves - multiculturalism, openness to the world and Canada’s position as a global trading nation. We’re playing a ring around the rosy here, attempting to protect the profits of the distributors. Bill C-2 allows an entrenched company to say, "You can’t buy from the U.S. or any other provider." If it’s such a good idea, why don’t we extend it to all of the media? Why doesn’t The Globe and Mail say, "Hey, wait a second, you can’t buy the New York Times?" If it were applied in the world of newspapers, we would say this is outrageous. It’s offensive to the sort of society we want to live in. But, for some reason, it sounds okay once you do it in the world of electronic communication, where there is a long history of silly regulation. How do the businesses justify their claims? It’s justified by the claim that this is good for Canadian television and, therefore, good for Canadian culture. They’re wrapping themselves in the flag, basically. And, I don’t think it’s good for Canadian culture, or for Canadian television. These are measures, which make both Canadian television and Canadian culture weaker, in my view, not stronger. What do you think about the increased powers for the RCMP, proposed by the Bill C-2? There were a lot of questions before the committee about who’s actually targeted by this bill. Is it the individual at home, or is it some big pirate TV operation? There’s an enormous amount of confusion over that, and the bill extends the power of inspectors by allowing them to enter any premise where they believe that something illegal is going on. They only have to have a suspicion (something is occurring), and it extends to include things like software and computers, which were never foreseen in the earlier versions of the Radiocommunication Act. So, it gives some abusive powers. But if we just set the powers aside, and you think of all the important things the RCMP could be doing, is it a really valuable use of our resources to say the RCMP should be breaking down people’s doors to make sure they’re not watching a Brazilian soap opera or World Cup Soccer?" I’m not concerned that the RCMP is going to suddenly go out of control, but it actually lays the groundwork for that sort of abuse to become acceptable and easy. We’re not on that slippery slope yet, but why would we build the slippery slope to begin with? Should the grey satellite TV market be legalized? I think that the grey satellite TV market should be legal, and I don’t think it should be legal merely under the condition where the licensed provider says it’s not profitable (to carry certain channels). Our freedom of choice to access the content we want should not be dependant upon a corporation’s judgment of its own profitability. They’re going to be the least objective judges in this matter. Would we allow a bookstore to say, "You may never buy a book from anybody except the Canadian book store"? It would be offensive to the spirit of democracy itself. And I think it’s just as offensive when it is applied to electronic communication. Just as you can get any book, any magazine from anywhere around the world, I should be allowed to get television from anywhere in the world. Obviously, there’s a cost attached to that - some of those signals are going to be more expensive than others, but some books are more expensive than others. There should be some sort of, I’ll call it a reciprocity agreement, between Canada and the U.S., that covers the theft of satellite TV signals. There are a lot of people living in the U.S. who subscribe to Canadian satellite services, just as Canadians subscribe to American services. Some general omnibus agreement should be reached to cover that. What, in your opinion, should be the role of the CRTC in dealing with these matters? The CRTC is an agency, which needs a great deal of reform. Wouldn’t it be great if the CRTC did its job for a change? If they did useful things like ensuring that TV is a universal service that is affordable. Instead, basically the CRTC has been captured by the TV industry, and when the TV industry says, "Jump," the CRTC says, "How high?" It’s not a watch dog, it’s a lap dog. I think that what we’re witnessing is a situation in which entrenched commercial interests and cultural elites are going to a 1950s-type alliance, creating a regulatory apparatus that works against the declared interests of most Canadians. And now, we have government agencies such as the CRTC, whose main function appears to be to maintain the apparatus itself, rather than to inquire into the interests and desires of Canadians. So, we’ve built up a really lousy system for ourselves. What do you think should be done to improve Bill C-2 and make it more acceptable for the Canadians? I would scrap most of Bill C-2. I would say black market TV piracy clearly should not be legal. But I would look at the question of the provision of television signals, from the point of view of citizens’ rights and the rights of consumers, and I would say that the citizens have the right to access, to consume, to purchase, to acquire any sort of cultural good that they want. If I can buy any book, any magazine, any film I want, I should be able to get any television station that I want as well. Consider Canadian literature, and authors such as Margaret Attwood, and other writers nominated for international prizes. Did Canadian literature get to be good and internationally recognized by running to the RCMP and asking for protection from American books? Or did it become good because Canadian get access to world literature, and they were able to measure what they did against that world standard, and then, distribute their own stuff globally? The same thing is slowly happening with Canadian film. We’ve seen recently that, for the first time ever, Canadian film and video rentals are going up and up. Slowly but surely, Canadian film is building an audience, and it’s building an audience not by saying we can’t show American films in Canada.

Carleton U professor says Bill C-2 restricts viewing choices of Canadians

News | 06/04/2004 4:00 am EDT

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