#Globe Fail, or "It's the Context, stupid."

TODAY'S GLOBE AND MAIL has an absolutely textbook definition of the way the media often distorts issues by leaving key bits of context and framing out.

Interestingly enough, I've experienced this in just about every news story I've ever been directly involved in. It's a little disheartening.

The article, by James Bradshaw and Karim Bardeesy is titled, very prejudicially, "Music Industry Seeks New Levies."

That's a great way to foment grumbling right there, of course. Because it's the music industry -- or as I pointed out yesterday, more accurately, the "record industry," who've been suing people, and who've thrown their weight behind digital locks that screw up people's computers, invade privacy and prevent some lawful uses of material the user has paid for. In reality, Thursday's calls for a levy extension to hard drives, Ipods, and other storage media was put forth by several creator groups & individuals at the Town Hall -- not just the music industry. I have nothing to do with the music industry -- which makes it doubly annoying that the authors of the Globe article chose to misquote me:

A town hall meeting in Toronto on Thursday evening – dominated by music industry executives andintellectual property lawyers, and attended by Industry Minister Tony Clement – sparked a lively debate about the iPod tax.

When digital music downloading caught on in the late 1990s, the Canadian government established a levy on blank recording media, compensating artists for the copying of their music. The fee is now 24 cents per audio cassette and 29 cents per CD.

“The levy works so well, we don't even realize we're paying it,” television writer Dennis McGrath said.

But the fee was already dated when it launched in 1999. The era of mass downloading – through sharing hard drives, flash memory, DVDs, music players, or online file-sharing networks – is here. Fewer people are buying blank CDs, and blank tapes are obsolete. So the money generated for artists fell to $32.5-million in 2007 from $39.4-million in 2004, a 17-per-cent decline.

A regular annual drop in music sales has spurred the industry to try again. With two million iPods and iPhones in Canada, according to the mobile advertising firm AdMetrics, the potential haul from Apple products alone could be substantial.

Now, besides the fact that they spelled my name wrong -- which happens all the time, but isn't a great sign -- if you check the webcast or read the transcript of the proceedings, you'll see exactly how they changed my quote.

What I actually said was, "The levy has worked so well, that we had a guy here tonight who doesn't even realize he's been paying it."

That's a very different quote -- a quote that demands context.

So here's the context: Sophie Millman, the jazz artist, stood up and spoke in favour of the levy as a way to recover some of the monies lost by artists to the pirating of their materials via peer to peer networks.

Later on a young gentleman, whose name I gather from Geist's site was Tariq, spoke against the levy, explaining that he's never paid it at the cash when he bought CD's.

Of course, that's the not the way the levy works. Like the levies that are placed on Gas at the pump, the blank media levy is included in the price of purchase before the consumer buys the product.

That's the point I was speaking to. But the messy reality doesn't necessarily support the Globe writers' thesis -- that the hated music industry, having failed to secure a greedy levy in the past, are now trying again in a different way. Cue the heavy handed music -- Dum Dum DUM!

The rest of my remarks on Thursday throw my support for an Ipod or DVR levy into proper context. It's absolutely an imperfect solution, for both sides -- under a levy system, artists will never receive as much money as they would if their works were paid for 100%. And some people who buy Ipods who don't ever download, or some people who buy hard drives for a purpose other than storing ripped DVD's or music, might have to pay a levy for an activity they don't participate in.

But that, my friends, is what's called a compromise on both sides. And the result -- the price -- of that compromise from my point of view is that we throw out the restrictive and backward thinking, DRM, DMCA style U.S. copyright -- where digital locks are thrown over content to incovenience users, and Industry Organizations spend a whole lot of time threatening people and filing lawsuits for having a downloaded Coldplay mp3 or episode of Friends on your home computer. It's a concept called, "Collective Licensing," and it recognizes the reality that digital networks, and peer-to-peer is here to stay.

If we move beyond the idea of the bricks-and-mortar content as a physical thing arguments, then just maybe we can focus on ways peer-t0-peer distribution could actually be monetized. The taint will be gone, and a great 21st century technology can lead to new market and opportunities.

$75 on top of the cost of an Ipod sounds like a lot to me, too. So maybe that's too much. Point is, the intellectual underpinning of the call for a levy is far more sophisticated, and forward thinking, than either the "information wants to be free" retards or the buttoned-down Globe writers want you to believe. The flaky artists are actually trying to come up with a workable solution here, that blends with the technological reality.

Screenwriters already have a Collection Society that distributes monies from foreign sales of the shows they wrote. I'm on the board -- it works well. It doesn't get them every dollar they're owed, but hell, it's actual real money -- not a theoretical payday that depends on being able to stamp out consumer behavior that's here to stay anyway.

Furthermore, if we get beyond the fight over digital locks and peer-to-peer, maybe we could actually tackle some of the big consumer issues around copyright that don't get a lot of air -- things like the abolition of crown copyright, the length of copyright terms, fair use in the area of parody and satire -- and any of a hundred other real, important issues.

But none of that fits within the Globe writers' narrow categorization of an us-and-them cash grab. They sneak in that the CD levy was obsolete when it was approved, because of the move to networks and storage on hard drives -- without discussing the other philosophical underpinning to the levy argument -- it's technology neutral. It doesn't tie us into talking about what we do with a physical storage device or product that might not be around in five or ten years. It will actually allow our copyright laws to function as technologies change, rather than be inadequate and hopelessly out of date, as the current law is, and as the law the Conservatives proposed just two years ago would be today.

Any and all of that could be said. But none of it would fit into the thesis of the article. So, you know, it's probably just easier to change my quote to give it the context you want.

Nice.

Two points to end off:

First, just so the black hat-white hat reductivism at work here is in even sharper relief: when the court struck down the extension of the levy to the Ipod by the Copyright Board, I was in favor of that ruling. Not because I didn't think the Ipod levy was a good idea, but because I recognized that it was overstepping the law as laid out in the (old) Copyright Act.

Second:

Ironically, after the Town Hall, Tariq who doesn't pay the CD levy sought me out -- and said to me that he knows he didn't pay the levy because he buys no-name spindles of CD-Rs that only cost 10 bucks on College Street. So that's why levies don't work.

Uh. Okay?

In that case, maybe that makes my crack at his expense during the town hall not as accurate as it might have been. He wasn't clear in his point, so inadvertently, I miscategorized what he was trying to say. (And to be fair, he did it first.)

But in any case, it's a distinction without a difference. If you're buying knockoff, grey market stuff, you're more in the piraters' column, anyway. We don't make law or set rates based on the people who steal cable or who buy knockoff sneakers, either.

Copyright is a contentious issue, no matter how you slice it. There is much that I feel needs to be done to protect consumers' rights -- but that discussion must absolutely go hand in hand with a workable, technology neutral solution to the problem of artists' not being compensated for their intellectual property.

Lumping our concerns together and spinning them as another grab by the music industry is dirty pool and not worthy of the Globe & Mail.