Online television distribution
The fee-for-carriage (or value-for-signal) debate misses the point. Television delivery is already moving online. Bell now has a pure IPTV delivery system for television in condos. Sites like Hulu provide on-demand access to programming. Granted, IPTV has been hyped now to the point that people are getting sick of it, but the simple fact is that television is moving inevitably to internet distribution. Canada was almost a decade ahead of the United States on internet delivery, until Parliament modified the Copyright Act to neuter the emerging business model.
Specifically, Parliament modified the Copyright Act to prevent retransmission of television online, despite allowing the cable companies to continue to aggregate over-the-air signals without having to worry about copyright. Section 31 writes that it “is not an infringement of copyright for a retransmitter to communicate to the public by telecommunication any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work [...]” but defines a “‘retransmitter’ [as] a person who performs a function comparable to that of a cable retransmission system, but does not include a new media retransmitter.”
With that one change to the Act, Parliament shut down innovative sites like iCraveTV, who were already rebroadcasting television online in 1999. For comparison, Hulu didn’t launch until 2007. In fact, the government was originally going to extend the Copyright Act to include online distribution, but the Heritage Committe caved to special interest pressure from the United States, the broadcasters, and the cable industry. Sound familiar?
I’m sad that our government surrendered to old media special interests. Much like we lost our early advantage in telecom and internet penetration, we threw away a potential lead in new media business models. Hopefully we don’t continue the trend with the current work on the Copyright Act or surrender to US pressure again in the form of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).