I just want to say welcome to everybody.
I'm really excited about this panel, it is a packed panel of presentations.
So we have six presentations, 10 minutes each, and of those four presentations are pre recorded.
And two of them will be delivered live, which is super.
In either case, please feel free to ask questions and comments in the chat as people are speaking.
It doesn't mean that they'll reply to them right away.
But they'll be there so that we can refer back to them when it comes to the q and a.
I am suggesting that we do all six presentations
first.
I know it'll be a ton of interesting information, but I just want to make sure
that everybody has the chance to do their presentations, and then we can have a kind
of a broader conversation
at the end of that and pick up questions from there.
While people are presenting, please if you would be on camera with your slides.
Thank you.
Otherwise, cameras on or off as you prefer.
Please mute, unless you're speaking, and that includes either as
a presenter or somebody who's asking our question.
And I think that is it.
David, I think I've covered everything.
I think otherwise, we are ready to roll.
So I'm Mary Elizabeth Luka, I'm at University
of Toronto, and I am co-lead of the cultural policy Working Group on Archive/Counter-Archive.
My pronouns are she, her, and they.
I'm Debbie Ebank Schlums, and I'm a PhD student
at York University and Cinema and Media Studies and research assistant with Archive/Counter-Archive,
and my pronouns are she and they.
My name is Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, and
I'm a PhD candidate in the communications department at Simon Fraser University.
I'm a student researcher, with the policy group for Archive/Counter-Archive,
and my pronouns are she / her / they.
Hi, I'm Claudia Sicondolfo, I'm a PhD candidate
at York University in the Cinema and Media Studies Department and a Vanier scholar.
I'm also a student researcher on the Archive/Counter-Archive
project, and my pronouns are she and her.
My name is Reagan Swanson I'm the executive
director at the Archives, Canada's LGBTQ2+ archives, and a PhD candidate at the University
of Dundee in Scotland in archives.
My pronouns are she and her.
Archive/Counter-Archive is a six year $2.5
million partnership project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
It includes seven case studies and 28 official
core partners, and that number is actually growing, made up of representatives from universities,
provincial and federal archives, artists-run centers, and community organizations across
Canada.
The project itself involves more than 100
collaborating artists, academics, and activists.
In this presentation, members of Archive/Counter-Archive's
cultural policy working group and principles of respect ad hoc group will share some observations
about the evolving
working processes and governance structures
that inform Archive/Counter-Archive.
Archive/Counter-Archive seeks to be firmly grounded within the various communities and
case studies that we are working alongside
and attempts to directly address and activate
reconciliation and related ethical commitment.
The one size fits all model doesn't work for
several reasons,
but mostly because there are different types
of community archives, especially community artists run centers that might not consider
themselves to be community archives in the archival literature sense of the word.
This diversity within the community and within
the project is both a strength and a weakness because it can cause difficulties when the
projects need to lump all the community archives together.
So this project has to balance between artists-created
videos and home movies and many different types of video material when it considers
working with individual community archival collections.
Community archives find themselves trying
to navigate and operate within the Archive/Counter-Archive framework, which is academic and bureaucratic.
They do this work often without knowledge
of how to navigate these systems, including understanding policy and language that is
mandatory as part of the grant.
When it comes to community content, community
archives should have the right, and really do have the right, to decide who gets access
to the material.
Digitizing and showcasing the material is
going to be dependent on the community's willingness to share.
However, these decisions are often based on
relationships that are created between academics and the communities they work with.
As there is no government funding for the
operations of any community archive within Canada, community archives are participating
in these type of projects to find funding for digitization,
and for the ongoing preservation and operations
of their collections and institutions.
This need, and this is a very real need, can
create a power imbalance within these academic grants.
As you continue to work, the protocols for
working with community archives have to be different for each community.
The community might define for themselves what they consider an archive.
For instance, stories are regarded as archives
in Indigenous communities, clearly distinguishing community memory keeping from the colonial
record.
So we've actually spent, as a working group,
the first 18 months of the project just working at details of a base model contract, which
ultimately, in the end, we've decided must be carefully adjusted per case study at a
per partnership AV collection.
ACA also wishes to present these digitized
collections and commissioned works within an online platform at festivals (when those
resume), in exhibitions in person and online, and in scholarly and other lead publications.
The parameters of these uses are in development.
The ACA case studies give a sense of both the non institutional and institutional relationships
established between ACA affiliates and community groups, and participating archives.
The different relationships necessitate that
ACA assumes different responsibilities and varying levels of accountability to those
involved in the project.
These variances between academics and non
academic research contexts and conceptions of research outputs are one area where these
different responsibilities are realized and played out.
In working with these case studies Archive/Counter-Archive
researchers seek to acknowledge a long-standing history of negative experiences between community
archives and community-based artists with academics.
For example, university ethics protocols developed
for working with Indigenous communities did not suffice.
A principles of respect process and document was then initiated in 2019 to address just
junctures between Archive/Counter-Archive
and affiliated communities.
Following this process, a principles of respect ad hoc committee was established consisting
of representatives from the Archive/Counter-Archive executive, members across diverse working
groups,
and the Archive/Counter-Archive Indigenous
and black artists and residents.
By 2020, the pandemic and Black Lives Matter
movement, tethered as they are to many aspects of our lives today, altered the core work
and governance process of ACA.
When the principles of respect committee convened
together in the fall of 2020, it was tasked with creating a response to BLM.
What started out as an ad hoc workshop evolved
into the central focus for the 2020 online symposium.
The principles of respect functioned as a sounding board for the development of the
symposium, after which the executive committee continued with the planning.
The symposium was anchored by a public keynote address by the artist Deanna Bowen on her
exhibition, Black Drones in the Hive, which included constellations of black archival
documents and images.
Talks were followed by network-only discussions.
The stated objective of the symposium was
to deliver researchers a set of questions to apply to their projects and classrooms.
Some of the work that is left to do in the wake of the symposium involves distinguishing
which questions are helpful in terms
of how they might shape anti racism learning
and action going forward.
One of the key questions that we have had
to consider in the development of our research focus is that of artists and community partner
remuneration and the ethical use of archival material.
The issue of artists thieves appears at several levels of the
project in the commission of artists works,
in the online exhibition of artists works, in the offline exhibition of artists works,
and then the inclusion of digitized copies of artists works in a research archive of
the Vulnerable Media Lab.
While commission and offline presentation
fees are somewhat straightforward to negotiate, existing visual and media arts fee schedules,
that is the IMA and Carfax fee schedules, provide little guidance on fees for online
presentation.
Given that the
Archive/Counter-Archive online platform is
still in development, we have opted to not include clauses for online presentation in
the initial contract for digitized material, and to devise new contracts for the use of
digitized materials as needed.
For example, our Native Video Productions
is creating presentations of living archives that embed historical images and video interviews
with Inuit women recounting their experiences of urban life.
Other case study in collaboration with the
Nova Scotian archives aims to remediate the works of pioneer female filmmaker Margaret
Perry.
The Winnipeg Film Group case study seeks to digitize material
that is disintegrating in order to preserve
it, but also for use in educational and festival presentations.
In addition, artists in residence seek to access
media archives to the CBC, the NFB, and Library and Archives Canada, sometimes for repatriation
and sharing back to the communities from whence they came, and sometimes to generate new artistic
works.
So several questions are left hanging, such
as whether or not full works or excerpts will be made available on the Archive/Counter-Archive
platform, and for how long.
Here, the knowledge sharing impetus of academia
potentially clashes with the ethical responsibilities that Archive/Counter-Archive has towards artists
and rights holders.
There's no doubt that artists and rights holders benefit from having their work
preserved at the Vulnerable Media Lab, but
this arrangement nonetheless brings into question power dynamics between academia and community.
Great, thank you for that first video.
That was clearly the video that my team was in, and I just as a quick reminder all the
bios for all of the presenters are available in the program.
Our next presentation is going to be a live
presentation, so I will time it, and I will give you a two minute warning verbally
once we're eight minutes in.
Are you good for sharing your screen?
[Iris Richer]: Yeah.
Okay.
Is that okay?
Yeah?
Good afternoon everyone.
First, I would like to thank the organizers
of the conference, and I'm very pleased to be here today on behalf of Véronique Guèvremont
and Diane Saint-Pierre.
I'm Iris Richer, currently a PhD student at
the Université Laval in Quebec.
And I will present some of the results of
the research carried out into the project entitled, "Recognizing and supporting the
specificity of digital cultural goods and services in the digital environment."
Until July 2020, this research project consisted
in the review and legal analysis of legal and cultural policy measures in eight states,
two separate national organizations, and two regions.
The objective of this project was to identify
good practices that could inspire Canada to adopt new legal or cultural policy measures
to protect its national cultural content in the digital environment.
For the realization of this project, two research
teams from different disciplines were mobilized, a legal team and the cultural policy team.
Having participated in the work of the legal
team myself, I will focus more specifically on a brief presentation of the results existing,
which have been classified into five sections deemed to be the most innovative areas of
action.
First of all, I will present some reforms
of audiovisual sectors, which also includes financial contribution of platforms to France
supporting the creation and production of national content.
And also is the very important topic of discoverability,
then, artificial intelligence, and finally, taxation.
First, it appears, a number of states have
started to undertake reforms into the audiovisual field in order to modernize their legal frameworks
and funding mechanism to better include new digital practices and factors.
The most important project in this respect
is that of France, which has attempted to reshape its system.
I will highlight during this presentation some of these measures.
It also should be noted that the adoption
of the revised audiovisual media services, directed in 2008 by the European Union, which
has to be transposed into national law by September, 2020 has given an impulse to set
reforms in the member states
of the European Union.
Therefore, in order to maintain the vitality
of national and local production on their presence in the digital environment, funding
mechanism, have to be revised to include platforms.
In this regard, the adoption of the audiovisual
measure services directive by the EU, a lone member state, if they so wish to set up a
system of contribution to the financing of national contents and to ensure that for a
platform such as Netflix
also participate.
It is now an obligation in some countries,
such as Denmark, where 2% of the revenues generated by these companies on the Danish
territory must be reinvested in Danish production.
Such measure is also being adopted in countries
such as Spain, or France, where it is also more ambitious.
Since France is already applying a tax of 5.15% on the revenue, which is allocated to
the National Film Centre
and is also considering that 25% of the revenues
generated by the platforms should now be reinvested in French national production.
And such a measure should be adopted in Spring 2021, so very soon.
Our third innovative area is discoverability.
As a reminder, discoverability is the ability
of the content to capture the attention of a user on the internet in a way that leads
to the discovery of other content.
In the digital environment, we know very well
that the recommendation algorithm used by platforms may most definitely influence the
discoverability of cultural content.
In this regard, several types of measures have
been identified as tools to promote discoverability, and I will just mention some of them:
Our first example is once again the European
directive, because it provides not only for quota of at least 30% of European works in
the catalog of the platforms, but also for an obligation to promote visibility of this
work,
increasing the likelihood that they will actually
be discovered and consumed by the platform users.
In addition, in some countries, national platforms
have been created an aim to give a permanent place to national content.
These are mostly public private partnerships,
such as Salto in France, or Britbox in the UK.
It is still too early to tell whether they
will become a permanent feature of the audiovisual landscape in these countries.
Some states have also provided their national
cultural industries, with experts in digital technologies and platforms to help them promote
the visibility of their content, particularly by improving the metadata used to describe
this content online.
Such strategies currently implemented by the
Arts Council England in the UK.
And finally, more specifically in the area
of data use, while measures that we can highlight is the origins finder platforms, which is
also in UK, and which supports cultural organization to better understand and exploit the user
data available to them.
In the field of artificial intelligence, the
adoption of national strategy is widespread in other countries under study, but they rarely
mention the cultural sector.
They aim to apply more generally to all sectors
including culture, and it should be noted that many non-binding instruments, such as
declaration, recommendation, and guidelines
are adopted by institutions such as the Council
of Europe and the European Union institution.
However, here again, they do not refer specifically to culture, but to nevertheless be read as
having an impact on this sector.
In this respect, it should also be recalled
that a recommendation on the topic of AI is currently being negotiated at UNESCO, and
its adoption could have a positive impact on national measures in this field.
Since the section of this instrument is specifically
devoted to culture.
And finally, bending the adoption of an international
agreement on taxation of the digital giant by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, which is helped for this summer.
Some states have already established provisional
taxes on digital services.
It is the case in France with the GAFA tax in place since
July 2019, and in Spain and UK as well.
However, platforms that distribute cultural
contents are not yet affected by these
Il reste deux minutes.
Merci.
And finally some countries such as France or
Australia requires streaming services to pay goods and services tax.
And finally, I will say a little bit about
the legal and cultural policy developments in Canada.
We saw that some of the advances that
have been identified in other countries are also being considered by the Canadian government.
It includes as a Bill C-10 currently under
consideration in the House of Commons to restore equity between public podcasters and digital
platforms, by extending the scope of application of the Broadcasting Act to those platforms.
And it will include the obligation to contribute
into funding of national creation.
However, the modalities of these instruments
in terms of funding for national content and possible application of codecs, especially
for French language production will have to be determined later by the CRTC.
And moreover, obligation regarding
discoverability and the promotion of Canadian works
should also be adopted.
At last, with regard to the taxation of the
revenues generated by digital platforms in Canada,
the government has decided to apply a temporary tax of 3% of their revenue
until a much lateral agreement is reached.
However, some platforms have actors not to
be included as didn't the case with Netflix, but they will be subjected, at least to the
payments of their goods and services tax.
This concludes my presentation, and this brief overview of what we consider
to be the most innovative policies, and I
remain at your disposal for any questions or
comments you may have.
Thank you.
Parfait, thank you, that was right on the nose.
Thank you so much, and seconds to spare.
Well done.
Thank you for that presentation, and really interesting kind of scope of policy instruments
and how they were used in different countries really nice foundation refer other people's
work.
Thank you, Iris, and thank you to your colleagues.
Now we will have a recording.
Sharon Jeannotte is presenting on digital platforms
and analog policies, governance issues in Canadian
cultural policy.
Good morning.
I should say at the outset that this is not
exactly the paper that I was going to present when this conference was originally scheduled
for May of last year.
But when I returned to this paper I was going
to present,
I realized that a lot of changed in the year,
and that, I think about the subject of digital
platforms and analog policies had also evolved.
In addition, there's been a lot of developments,
especially in the past week or so since I first put together this particular
presentation.
Therefore it's a bit of a moving target and
I have to say that it's a work in progress at this point.
However, the starting point, that is still
the same, my paper, I wanted to look at three governance issues with regard to cultural
policy in Canada.
First of all, what the federal government
decided to govern.
Secondly, the normative imperatives guiding
the government or why it decided to govern those aspects of culture.
And finally, how they decided to govern it.
Now, this is the how part.
This slide shows the types of policy action
instruments available to the federal government to intervene in public policy issues.
I've shown them along that continuum that
goes from the least interventionist to the most interventionist.
Nodality, the first one, is sometimes referred to as
persuasion, and that's the power of the government
to seek advice, and to develop an information
base on the subject of interest.
Treasuries.
the so called power of the purse.
The government's ability to financially support behaviour that it wishes to encourage.
Authority is a much more interventionist instrument than the first two.
Government can create laws,
regulations, and taxes
that plot legal frameworks, or even
sanctions to policy areas that it considers important.
Organization, the fourth category of PAI, is the most
interventionist out of all the instruments.
It occurs when governments undertake activities themselves,
instead of leaving them to other sectors to carry out.
It includes various public agencies and bodies,
including crown corporations, public agencies
that operate at arm's length that are still under
the direction of government.
This slide illustrates the what and the why,
parts of my inquiry.
It's based partially on some work that I did
for a chapter in a forthcoming book about Canada's
accession to UNESCO's 2005 Convention on
the protection and promotion of diversity of
cultural expression.
I should mention that this is a simplified
version of a much more detailed table.
The left hand column outlines what I think
are the three traditional normative imperatives that motivated the Canadian government and
its cultural policy interventions
from 1849 to 2000, and they are from top to
bottom, national identity in our cultural expression and service of national identity;
promotion of cultural sector; economic vitality;
and finally, promotion of diverse forms of
cultural expression.
National identity tended to be the earliest normative imperative propelling cultural policy,
While the other two interventions, motivations
became more prominent in the latter part of the 20th century.
The columns to the right
show the various policy action instruments
that have been utilized over the years, focusing mainly on the platforms in the area in which
they were adopted, which were mainly broadcasting, publishing, film, and sound recording.
As you can see the government mainly began
usually began its interventions with the nodality instrument.
This was generally followed by some type of organizational intervention such as crown
corporations or agencies.
Treasury and authority interventions tended
to come later in the period, particularly after the private sector became more involved.
So this is a very brief overview of what has
changed on the cultural policy scene since 2000.
It covers issues with which most of this audience
will be familiar,
but grouped under the three normative imperatives
discussed on the last slide, plus one additional one that I think has become more prominent
since the turn of the century.
Traditional motivations about Canadian cultural
policy have not been diminished by the so called digital transformation,
and in many ways, has been exacerbated by
it, as large digital platforms such as Netflix and Amazon have entered the program production
and distribution field.
In addition, as other digital platforms such
as Facebook and Google have met and moved into
the information distribution field, there's
a growing concern among governments, not just Canada's, about the impact on democracy
and cultural rights as the lines
blur between credible and fake news sources.
This has been exacerbated by the dominance
of these platforms in the marketplace for digital ads which has jeopardized the market
positions of many traditional media outlets.
Canada, like many other governments is also
concerned with the growth of hate speech and other negative content that is
also threatening social cohesion and the quality of democratic discourse.
Now, this very busy slide is an update of
the table I showed you earlier, focusing on the post 2000 period.
It looks at how these concerns have been addressed
over the past 20 years or so,
but again, I should mention that it is a simplified version of what's taking place during the
period.
The three traditional policy concerns have continued
to guide the federal government's interventions.
And as a second place, many significant financial
investments, such as the Canada Media Fund and the Canada Councils Program supporting
the arts and cultures of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples
during the past decade or so.
The government has also made extensive use
of its authority in recent years to negotiate cultural exceptions in all, in its major trade
agreements to ensure that it retains the right to invest in Canadian cultural products and
services.
As I mentioned earlier, in recent years the
government has also introduced several PAIs to address emerging concerns about democracy,
fairness, and cultural rights linked to the increased digitization of cultural content.
There been some significant nodalities,
that's listed in the second column
at the bottom, in the form of reports by parliamentary committees and expert panels on the impact
of digital disruptions on both Canadian journalism and the economic vitality
of the Canadian media and cultural sector.
As well, several authority PAIs in the form of tax
measures to level the digital playing field
between major forum platforms and Canadian media platforms have been introduced.
This has culminated in Bill C-10,
now before the House of Commons, which is intended
to modernize the Broadcasting Act to address
these issues.
So, how's the landscape of government PAIs
changed since about
2000?
To briefly summarize, there have been fewer organizational
PAIs except in traditional brick and mortar platforms such as museums.
However, the government appears to be relying increasingly on Treasury and authority PAIs
to achieve its cultural policy objectives.
All four of them, not just the most recently,
one of the most recent concerned.
Most notable in the authority categories
increased reliance on taxation as an instrument to level the digital playing field.
Another interesting development has been the
utilization of what I am calling multilateral sovereignty in the form of international coalitions
and partnerships to achieve its normative imperatives.
in the cultural field.
I have shown one example on the table,
the use of the cultural exemption clause and international trade agreements.
However, there are developing coalitions and other areas such as taxation,
the curbing of online hate and remuneration
of news media for online use of their content.
And these are some of the developments
that are evolving, even as we speak,
and that will change the landscape.
of the public action initiatives that the government
will be taking in the future,
at least I believe so.
Anyway, 10 minutes seems to be up so I will leave
that there, and I thank you for your attention,
and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.
Great, thank you, Sharon, that was great.
These, these big broad kind of configurations and questions and kind of trying to see the
system are really interesting in, are very interesting
in particular how these last two papers kind
of intersected.
Thank you so much.
So our next paper is also being delivered live by Pascal and Jacqueline.
Pascal Chapdelaine
and Jacqueline MacLeod, University of Windsor and University of Winnipeg, respectively.
Thank you, that looks great.
And the title of the paper is Contested Sovereignties:
States/Media Platforms/Publics and the Regulation of Media Content and Big
Data.
I see another big scope paper coming.
I will give you a verbal warning at eight
minutes so that you know you
have two minutes left.
I'll try not to interrupt you mid sentence.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mary Elizabeth for chairing this session
and thank you to the organizers of this conference,
this fabulous conference, so yes, this is another
very broad issue type of paper as a title
announces, and I'm co-presenting of course with Jacqueline today.
I'll start by just throwing the question out
there of our paper, which is very ambitious.
We asked, from a Canadian perspective, what
powers and levers does the state have in the borderless network society, and what role
should it play or not play
to ensure its citizens access quality diverse
representative news, cultural, scientific, and
other content that reflects and connects us
locally and globally.
Rather than answering this question with a detailed prescription,
our goal is to provide a framework of reference
that navigates between and mediate competing sovereignties.
It's an interdisciplinary project combining legal and final communication media analysis
with incursions into international relations and technology settings.
It's prompted by the 2020 future of communications report, many of you know, an ongoing legislative
Canadian reform bill, C-10.
Bill C-11, I will mention, that has been mentioned already,
in these presentations.
And it's also questioning sort of the rhetoric
behind quite harsh criticism around this report, including increased power of the CRTC and
Canada's assertion of our over internet media content to existing legal documents such as
technological neutrality,
net neutrality, territorial jurisdiction, and
of course, media, for me, communication to, which Jacqueline will talk about in a moment.
Before turning over to Jacqueline, I will just say a few words about the legal
connotation around sovereignty,
understanding that the word national and sovereignty
may have some of the, not too popular understanding when it comes to media regulation, to say
the least.
Basically, the modern concept of state sovereignty
is, and I'll quote the work of Samantha Besson, an international law scholar, is viewed as
a vessel
for the people.
And an interesting framework to talk about
how state power is mediated internally, and this is referring to issues of diversity,
and more connected to our paper the protection of personal data, as well as empowerment of
citizens through media content, and externally
with respect to digital platforms, and I refer
here to the work of Julie Cohen to which my colleague Jacqueline will talk about
in a moment.
Over to you, Jackie.
Thank you.
Can you hear me?
Oh, great, because that's not showing that at all.
Right, in my three minutes, we've got ourself
time to get this right, I'm going to offer a definition of sovereignty from legal scholar
Julie Cohen, and then sketch out how
this term is both useful and limited in thinking
about regulating online media in Canada.
Cohen, like Pascal, a legal scholar,
does interesting work to test the elasticity of the term sovereignty to convey the power
that the big six platform actors wield.
In a 2017 article, and thanks that slide is exactly
what I want, in her 2017 article
she asked whether platforms have assumed many
traits formally thought to define states.
She establishes that in traditional legal terms, a sovereign state has four key traits.
It's an entity,
one, or first, with defined territory; two, with
a permanent population; three, with the authority
to governance territory; and four, with the capacity to enter into relations with other
states.
She concedes that platforms cannot be said
to tick all the boxes in each of these four categories, since,
after all, they are virtual rather than physical spaces.
But she notes there are strong correspondences.
As this example from Cohen demonstrates, it can be interesting and useful to apply the
term sovereignty to current conversations about internet power and regulation.
Yet in our paper we work with us, as Pascal
was suggesting, a more flexible definition.
One that reckons borders or boundaries as
softer and more porous.
This is in keeping with a dominant strand
of thinking and communications theory from McLuhan onward.
In his view nobody or territory is ever hived
off or isolate,
but is part of an ecology or an assemblage, part of a trans national network and global
relations.
The term we just had, the multilateral
sovereignty echoes here.
Yet McLuhan and others
nonetheless asserted the need for some form of controller governing vision.
They argued individuals need systemic protections,
because we individually are not strong enough to push back against the corporate ties tech
tied.
One of McLuhan's key concerns was the question
of the internet, of who could take control the control tower, slide, finishing up here,
but many of you are familiar with his off site image of artists ascending to the
control tower to deliver media
regulation in a programmed environment so that
media is not rolling all over us but organized or orchestrated.
At a glance, the control tower image might sound outmoded or seem outmoded, even dangerous,
giving power over to some authority, some body, but if you dig in his idea here
it's actually both complex and relevant.
He doesn't want either state or corporate powers
to control media delivery.
But imagines a team of artists and scientists
acting with citizens, so they're not imposing expert schemes on a bondage public, but acting
in concert with them.
If we can just flip the slide forward and we'll
keep it there.
His image actually anticipates what many current theorists imagine using a concept of the
interactive comments as the regulating cohort.
Pascal.
Okay, in the little time that I have, I will
assert sort of a few main contentions of our paper and I think contribution to the literature.
The first one is that in the current media and legal conversions environment, there can
be no media content regulation
in the traditional sense, meaning equipment
quality, content requirements, standards, Canada
content division fund, just to name a few examples,
without paying due attention to personal data collection by media content undertaking.
And the idea behind this is that if media
content is an engine to democracy that requires close attention,
well, we better look at what happens behind the scenes as citizens consume this content.
And this is building on the work of Shoshana
Zuboff some of you may be aware of surveillance capitalism and the concept of behavioral surplus
she develops as a multi billion dollar resource extraction business with the police state
regulation oversight.
An example of application of this concept can
be found in the regulation of algorithms on content personalization, for example,
and something akin to net neutrality she said it depends.
And I note that, in this conference, Fenwick McKelvey and Robert Hunt will be presenting
on a topic similar to this notion about algorithm becoming essentially important, and
to be addressed in our cultural policy.
The collective national interest in the aggregate with respect to personal
data, for example CBC hosting broadcasts on
transnational platforms such as YouTube.
What is it being done with the personal data that matters to Canadians that we should know
about?
I submitted an access to information requests for that to the CDC and I'm waiting
to hear more about the agreements with YouTube.
The second plane is that we have the legal
tools necessary to assert some form of national sovereignty over media content, including
some form of regulation of internet media.
This is actually what has been tabled in Bill
C-10 as a proposal right now
that, as you may know, is under discussion in
the House of Commons.
And this flows into the--
Sorry to interrupt, just two minutes.
Okay, of territorial jurisdiction, a real substantial connection factor to Canada.
It also flows from the corrosive application
of technological neutrality, not in any blind sense but in a purposive sense, meaning that
if some principles were good in the older analog environment,
well, it becomes arbitrary not to apply the
same principles, promoting culture locally, regionally, globally, and making it accessible
to those captioning for example, the second listed requirements to continue doing this
and exerting the power where necessary
to do this as technology continues to evolve.
Assertion of national sovereignty is nothing more than a space for a collective party's
very transparent process, and the reverse of not interfering
could be leaving it to private mass market
conceal processes, and there is no such thing as a completely free internet.
I will leave the last word to my dear colleague, Jacqueline.
Jackie?
Thanks Pascal, and I'll go quickly because
it actually all rolls together.
If we go back to the former slide, it was indicating
that if we look at some of the history in
communications theory starting from starting from, but we arbitrarily use McLuhan as
our starting point, there's always this discussion
of the need for, whenever hope is expressed, the need for control coming from individuals,
they're not sufficient to the cause, but individuals exerting there and what an educated awakened
activity and
regulators and public good.
So if we can flip to the Zuboff,
all I'm going to try to indicate here is, oddly,
when you come to the end of her long treatise
looking at the, the wave of problems that have come with tech platforms,
she reverts to the similar hope that we'd
have the individual awakening and state exercise policy and regulation.
If we flip to the next
slide, we come to a Canadian expert Ron Deibart.
And it's a very similar kind of formula, there's
always some uniqueness and difference of emphases, but again, it's not just enough for personal
retreat.
It's not enough for the system to be tinkered
with, with reforms, the full reset to come up with a framework of restraints and that's
the sort of thing that we have in mind.
It's interesting; Deibart locates it not as a kind
of international or mega state,
he tends to think it's a local kind of move.
If we go to our next slide.
I won't go through it all, but an interdisciplinary
range of experts making this same dual-levered, an interactive appeal to say that there needs
to be change on at least these two levels but that they interact, they are not
hived off and separate.
If we add the last slide, it sums up our question.
What does it mean for establishing a Canadian regulatory framework?
And Pascal, you went through
the options that were examining so well.
I'll leave it with the last blue statement,
of what we're looking at: Canada will develop, or can develop, a flexible framework adapted
from our past practices.
Thanks very much.
Thank you both very much, that was, it's always so tough to reach the timeline when you're,
particularly when you're speaking live, well done.
And that's another kind of big, big picture
look but also some really specific questions that connect to some of the previous presenters.
Our last recording is by Kate Kribs, and it's titled Our Band is a Band Camp Band:
Making Music and Earning a Living in the Platform Era.
And I think we're ready.
Thanks.
Over the past two decades, North American
music industries have been reconfiguring themselves around the distribution, circulation, and
presentation
of music via online digital distribution and streaming platforms.
These changes made to the methods for selling
music ultimately alter how artists are compensated,
and usually not for the better.
Within the last few years, however, in Canada, there has been great change of foot at the
policy level with several committees
researching and examining the state of the
music industry in a digital world.
Currently, the discourse is circulating in
and around digitization and music, predominantly centred on the value gap.
According to the industry, the value gap refers
to the significant disparity between the value of creative content that is accessed and enjoyed
by consumers and the revenues that are returned to the people and businesses who create it.
For me, it represents a revivification
the piracy panic narrative that was widely circulated throughout the late 1990s and early
2000s in response to the boom and popularity of file sharing practices online.
In the era of the platform, piracy panic is
reframed as opposition to unauthorized streaming, primarily YouTube, in the hopes that specific
policy will be enacted to sanction music industry efforts to proceed unabated and realizing
substantial profits by
maintaining authority over the production,
distribution, and consumption of musical recordings.
So, how recent reports and reviews addressed
key changes to musician labor in the platform era?
In addition to Music Canada's two reports on
the value gap, the two additional policy documents
analyzed for this paper are the statutory review
of the Copyright Act
and the Shifting Paradigms Report.
Though the reports
are broad in scope, covering copyright, artists remuneration, and the cultural industries
in
Canada as a whole,
Regarding music and digitization, the reports had
two key complaints pertaining to the value gap that I'd like to highlight.
According to these reports, the first key problem
contributing to the value gap is outdated copyright.
Music Canada insists that the value gap
is a problem two decades in the making,
the result of how government policies were implemented around the world as part of the
early digital landscape.
In other words, the rule books that govern
the contemporary digital marketplace were drawn up in uncertain times.
While some critics have blamed the industry or the artists for being recalcitrant unwilling
to face the change in production and distribution
landscape brought by digitization, these reports
assert that the value gap is not the result of industries or even artists' failures to
adapt or evolve.
Rather it's the inability of policy to evolve with technology that is ultimately
prevented artists from
receiving fair market value for their work.
The second problem is that safe harbour exemptions
allegedly enable piracy.
Safe harbour exemptions were initially designed
and implemented to limit internet and online service providers' liability for acts of copyright
infringement committed to their services, but
Music Canada argues that YouTube abuses the
privilege.
The industry
argues that YouTube depresses consumer demand
for paid subscription models, which in turn results in poor artists' remuneration.
To suppose a copyright oversight, the industry argues that safe harbour exemptions should
only be available to automate
it and pass it intermediaries.
In so doing, record labels would force YouTube to adopt the pro rata industry-approved remuneration
model established and popularized by Spotify, but Spotify's payout scheme is not well loved
by musicians.
Ultimately what the music industry claims
it is asking for is a level playing field, one that ensures that all platforms adopt
the pro rata remuneration model started by Spotify, approved by the industry and loathed
by artists.
The value gap narrative therefore demonstrates
the industry's ongoing fixation with closing the gate that digitization opened, and
framing it as a matter of piracy, rather than addressing how to best remunerate artists
in the digital era.
The reports' collective devotion to artists
remuneration models is therefore more so in name than in practice, as the final documents
are focused on fostering revenue growth among platforms and labels, rather than providing
aid to artists.
The improvements
at the corporate level are meant to trickle
down to the artist, a persistent neoliberal myth that leaves those with little negotiating
power hope that some of the extraordinary wealth they help to generate will be returned
to them in some small way.
The revivification of piracy panic through the
value gap narrative is therefore a rhetorical maneuver mobilized to quell creator fears
rather than representing a concrete plan of action that could positively affect the material
reality of cultural creators
more broadly, and musicians, specifically,
While I agree that a value gap exists, I argue
it's not as the music industry describes it.
To be sure, the amount of royalties being returned
to musicians by streaming platforms is not adequate, but the problems causing this discrepancy
aren't as the music
industry present it.
To counter the industry
perspective, I very briefly cover some of the
perspectives shared with me by my interview participants.
For one, musicians, I spoke with don't want
a level playing field, at least not the way the music industry is claiming.
In fact, the openness of the playing field is already making it quite difficult to carve
out a living as there are numerous new entries
competing, far more than in earlier decades.
Furthermore, musicians I spoke with said
that revenues were paltry across the board and that YouTube and Spotify alike were returning
poor royalty payouts.
For the most part, the musicians I interviewed
found streaming unprofitable, and argued that the sale of music is only ever complimentary
to the more substantial earnings garnered through touring, which is itself challenging
as front end costs for touring
can be prohibitive for emerging acts.
In the end, it was the more producer-oriented
platforms, such as Bandcamp, that musicians I interviewed
not only aligned their own interests with,
but that they saw some direct profit from as well.
So what possible structural supports can be offered?,
My dissertation offers several solutions for
improving the working conditions and sustainability of making a living as a Canadian musician
in the platform era, including platform unionization and alternative platform models such as user
centric and cooperative
models, but for the sake of brevity and scope,
today I highlight just two policy-related solutions: a universal basic income, and a
publicly or nationally owned platform.
Establishing a base amount of income for all
adult citizens would allow for many individuals, not just musicians, to live a more comfortable
life knowing that basic expenses are covered.
Critics of UBI argue that it deincentivizes
workers, and that providing them with enough means of subsistence that they will no longer
feel compelled to work, but there is no empirical evidence to substantiate such a claim.
I don't, however, want to offer UBI as a primary
or exclusive solution to the precarity exploitation and pro remuneration experienced by musicians
and others.
In part, I am concerned that offering fiscal
support will merely paper over existing problems and inequalities, and even more disconcerting
would be the possibility that providing a UBI could justify the implementation of austerity
measures in other
important social sectors, including healthcare and education.
If the cost of UBI is untenable, smaller benefits
gained could be implemented for individuals not protected by the same measures as waged
laborers.
Such a program would take into account the unpredictable nature, cultural industries
and freelance employment,
and could be modelled after France's Intermittence du
Spectacle, an unemployment benefits program that provides internet and funding
to artists between gigs.
In Canada, for example, these funds could be administered by Factor,
the agency currently responsible
for disseminating grants from the Canada Music Fund.
The second solution I want to offer is a public
ownership model.
Over the past several years, American entertainment
attorney Henderson Cole has been working on a proposal called the American Music Library,
a taxpayer-funded streaming service that at once would act as a repository for all recorded
music, and also would
guarantee free access to all listeners across
the United States, not unlike a public library system.
In Canada,
there is a long history of government intervention into and support for the cultural industries,
so imagining a platform run by or through
the CDC, for example, doesn't sound entirely far-fetched.
We have publicly owned TV and radio in both
official languages as well as seven Indigenous languages.
So, couldn't we also then have a platform for the archiving management and distribution
of Canadian music?
Such a collective repository would fulfill
both cultural and economic policy objectives
by ensuring citizens have access to a wide range of musical recordings, and that musicians
get compensated for their procurement of an access to their music.
It's not an infallible solution, none of them
are, but they're worth consideration given what an immense contribution to Canadian culture
music makes.
Thank you.
Alright, and ties it up with actual culture material.
Excellent!
Thank you, Kate, that was great.
Okay!
So thank you everybody.
There is no shortage of big questions that have been placed on the table for this discussion,
and I'm just interested in feedback from people, comments, questions.
Some thought about where we could go with
some of the suggestions that have been made.
I will maybe start with the panelists, and ask.
Now that you've kind of seen all the rest of the presentations in the program,
is there something from any of the other presentations that you felt was kind of particularly relevant
or connects
in nice ways or interesting ways to your own work?
As you presented it here today.
Any thoughts?
Turn your--I know, the audio thing, right?
I'm glad to see that we're all thinking about
sovereignty in some ways still.
It's interesting to see some of the other
suggestions with regard to how action on the international front can translate into positive
outcomes for cultural sovereignty in Canada, so, you know, I found the other presentations
very interesting
in how they kind of explore different ways
of doing.
Yeah, I thought your presentation in particular,
Sharon, with Véronique's and Diane's in terms of thinking about kind of those,
those policy instruments that take place internationally and how they connect to the nation state we're
very, we're
very nicely kind of aligned, although you were
looking at quick different kinds of questions.
And I think that there's an [...] so I don't know if there's something in that kind
of, as you sort of think about how the work that you've done to survey those policy
instruments, how they're connecting back in
Canada, and I'm particularly, I'm thinking about
the kind of, the Francophone and non Francophone
approaches to the way in which culture is regulated.
Yes, thank you.
I must say,
I'm not an expert on Canadian cultural policy, because this project was based abroad,
so we surveyed, like, 10 jurisdictions.
And actually, it's not finished yet, so we didn't make,
We don't have all the links between this jurisdiction,
and Canada yet.
And, yeah, Canada doesn't have the,
the history with quotas, that some, some
European countries have since 1920s, and was a question of quotas and cultural content
of francophones and minorities such as Indigenous peoples and such.
It's a really important question
for Canada right now.
And it has to be considered by this C-10 bill, and the CRTC, when they will choose
the guidelines to apply this treaty in Canada.
It's an interesting prospect, I mean I just,
there's a part of me that's kind of horrified at the thought of the CRTC deciding anything
to do with content management, but it did come
up a couple of times.
And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way
at all, it's a legalistic governmentality kind of approach to things, and
it has the same sort of challenges as, for example, government funding of cultural
content
or production or distribution, also the same
opportunities.
And that was one of the things that I thought was really interesting, particularly Pascal
and Jacqueline, about the approach that you took in the work that you did and it comes
back to Sharon's
first comment about the importance of understanding
the kind of flexibility of what we mean by sovereignty and how it's being applied.
Right.
Yeah, so I think, if I may step in, Mary Elizabeth,
I think the sentiments you've just echoed in terms of, you know, being afraid
when we hear the CRTC getting involved, I mean we come across this all the time.
So I think definitely our paper is not,
as we said, prescriptive about how the CRTC should go about.
At the same time, we push back
a little without saying that, you know, there should be no play or that you know that the
structure that is there should
be disregarded completely.
I mean when you talk about regulation,
it can be as little as saying, yeah, we give you funding to this local organization and
you're going to take care of it.
And there has to be some power somewhere exercised
to collect the money.
You know, so it can contain different forms,
and I think when people sort of reject the notion of regulation as far as it goes,
may have different understanding of the word regulation.
It's a very broad concept
of course, and sovereignty is nothing
else than an exercise of power.
And an exercise of power also includes waiving
that power, right, so you don't need to exercise it all the time, and that's what
the CRTC has been doing, not making any claim of success of any sort, but the
CRTC has refrained from intervening
on many occasions, so that's part of the flexibility
of course that power and sovereignty entails.
Yes.
Yeah, one of the things that I really appreciated about your paper was this kind of reminder
of what is, you know, what are the mechanisms that
citizens get involved in, and I hear echoes
of that for example in Kate's paper around,
you know, what is it that works for musicians
versus what is it that works for an industry system, or a factory based kind of approach
to thinking about the generation of cultural content and--yep, go ahead.
Check in your audio.
Your,
Jacqueline, your audio is off.
It looks really, it looks really interesting.
Kate, I'll be quick.
Kate's paper where it depends on which publics are being embraced of the plurality
of publics as well because of course, that what you were addressing, speak so well to
the
need of musicians, but you'd have a lot of people still amongst the
the population who would be outraged to have
their Spotify, you know, to begin to be charged for things that have been free.
So I think there may be some traction in terms of public awareness and certainly that's what
a variety of commentators are crediting
and calling for.
But you knew that when you implement both of those suggestions that there's a, there's
degrees of pushback, but I just thought that to the extent there is one, the general public,
might not be happy about public, the public ownership model,
but maybe you can say something about, yeah
I never--I didn't actually mean it as the all-
inclusive and we eliminate every private model,
just like how in Canada we have public radio and TV and private radio and TV.
I figured the same thing could sort of apply,
and not just one repository.
Yeah, that's because they're physical, right,
so I mean, if we're talking about a digital streaming platform, we wouldn't need multiple
physical locations for it, so this is different.
And it's just talking about access, and this
is also coming from a dissertation about labor, so that the concerns about maybe the consumer
being miffed about paying for content is a little bit lower, and is more or less
part of what I'm kind of challenging in terms
of how the industry is influenced in discourses but also how the public's demand for certain
things have, within said process, ignored the
needs of the musician, so yes, I do highlight,
musician, but it is indeed
the entirety of the dissertation's focus, so
it does seem slanted, but it is entirely what my research is about.
So, yeah, it does, it mixes the sort of political economy parts, but the emphasis
is
on that missing voice which is often the musician.
We talked
a lot about consumers and industries, and
then sort of overlap, there are people over the labor or creator part of it, to a
degree, it's seen as an industry, like the creator and industry are seeing together as
one,
Whereas I kind of try very hard to make a
distinction between them.
Yeah, and I think that labor perspective is
a really interesting one because it does pull it apart, right, and even when thinking about
the Copyright Act, the Copyright Act isn't in the business of helping the individual
creator, it's in the business of helping
the copyright owner, right.
So those are, I think, those are good points, and not to depart from this but I, just in
case I don't want to miss, there are two questions, a couple questions in the chat, one of them
relates specifically to the Factor proposal and
but feel free to step in and say something
more, but the note is, I'm curious what identified Factor.ca as a potential administrator of
a UBI ish program for artists, between gigs.
Yeah, so again this is kind of a whole chapter
that expands on it, I only had about 10 seconds to talk about it, I said I was speaking very
quickly as well.
So I was basing it on France's Intermittent du Spectacle
which is a similar sort of funding, an arm's length institution run,
well, at arm's length from the French government that provides assistance, just strictly funding,
and Factor is indeed an
organization whose kind of existence is based on taking
money from the Canada Music Fund and administering it to individuals perhaps something more on
the provincial level, Ontario creators, or something.
There's a ton of different options, I just in very very limited
time was able to mention one, but because
they are the existing body that administers those funds, it seems logical that we might
look to them as the first, but no reason why a new one couldn't be created, no reason why
someone else couldn't be considered either.
Right.
And that kind of returns us to some of the earlier
questions, but just before, I say the note
that Miles Weafer
You've asked this question, Sharon, you mentioned
the big six platform operators.
Who are they, which ones are you referring
to, I think is the question, if you want to respond briefly to that.
Well, actually, I don't recall using the number six--
[Miles Weafer]: I'm sorry, was it five?
[Mary Elizabeth Luka]: It might have been five, six depends
on who you include right.
I'm referring based mainly to Google.
You know, all of their subsidiaries,
YouTube, every other place where content is streamed, and as has been pointed out,
not necessarily paid for.
Not, certainly not, the people who produced
it are very badly remunerated.
So the big six which is the acronym of
FANGAM and my thought was, fairly well known right, Facebook Amazon, Netflix Google, Apple,
Microsoft so just, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That configuration, right, which is a player and I think, you know, part of what
I think, again, really enjoyed about your paper,
Jacqueline and Pascal, was that was thinking
in Julie Cohen's terms about these environments, as
kind of, nation-state-like in their
ability to manage power.
I'm also interested in kind of how Sharon, the work that you've done in kind of pulling
out and [...] was making some comments in the
chat as, as a couple people were presenting,
but put, you know, that schematic of thinking
about what are all the component parts that we have at play here,
and where is the emphasis being placed, and how is it being kind of configured.
At the moment, that is different from the way, I love how you're
kind of like, I'll just do 150 year summary,
and then the 20 year.
Thank you for doing that because that was
historical context there, that was really helpful,
but I'm, you know, I mean one of the things
that I was really struck by was, we're operating within a really piecemeal system.
And then we're trying to retrofit by using
mechanisms such as Bill C-10 or other legislative instruments and then funding bodies or international
agreements as ways to intersect with our already- piecemeal structure, and I don't know if there's
a specific question you want
to bring up in this context, or Sharon, if there
are other kind of comments that you would
like to make around
how do we work within this kind of a system.
Well, just in the interest of full disclosure,
I can tell you that I was a bureaucrat for 35 years before I became an academic, and
a good
part of, portion of the time was spent as being
a bureaucrat in the cultural area.
And I have to say that there's never been
like a big master plan.
And it's always been messy.
And the reason I went back 150 years or more was because you can see that a lot of what
was done by government was based on, first of all, what was possible,
and then, what was judged to be desirable.
And those often didn't always match.
And, you know, someone mentioned quotas and
it's a little remembered fact that the CRTC developed the Canadian music content
quota for radio in the 70s.
and before that, there was not, wasn't much
of a Canadian music industry in terms of, at
least, of the monetary sides.
So, you know, what quotas, for example, just
to talk about an example that was put on the table
by some of the presenters, would quotas work
in a digital environment?
I sort of had my doubts, but then I'm not
one of the big thinkers on this.
So, you know, my interest originally was in taxation, and that's what my abstract talked
about.
But as I said, over the year, since we've been
confined by COVID, I've been thinking a bit about that and,
taxation is an interesting one because you
can apply it across the board to all entities, you know, you can see how cerebral that is
very quickly.
And it was administered by the CRA.
So there was no choice made, you either
qualified or you didn't.
So taxation, and you can see from my.
I think my second table, is starting to be
applied by the Canadian government, you know, they're starting to, they're going to charge
GST on all online platforms and that's coming into effect in July, I think.
And there's now the proposal to start taxing digital platforms
according to the revenues that they earn in
the country, that they're operating at, and that was referred to, I think, by...
I don't remember who,
who referred to that, it was a.
Yeah, I think it was [...], who said that,
you know, the OECD is getting into
an international tax treaty on that.
Yeah, but Canada, in C-10 is already indicated that it's going to, we're going to try and
move forward if, you know, and that one has been
discussing since 2013, and we still haven't
got it, so, but I think we're moving
forward, one way or the other.
But yeah, I mean it'd be ideal.
That's what I'm trying to say.
We'll do what we can.
When we can.
When it's possible.
Exactly.
Yeah, so, and that regulatory function in the CRTC
in that context, a very similar kind of how can we do something at the edges or not at
the central part that actually chews away or for support something
in interesting ways that are not
the same for every sector and not the same for every cultural producer, consumer, or
whatever,
however we want to configure it.
It's just 2:45, that's the official end, I would really encourage, I mean one of the
things
that was so fantastic about all these papers, and thank you very much to all of the presenters,
is that they tie really nicely to all the presentations
that are going to take place over the next
three days, and so I really encourage those who can to kind of look at the work tomorrow,
which are, and I have some gross generalizations here.
There's a whole series of
presentations on what I would describe as kind of power dynamics tomorrow on governance
on Thursday, and on use and practice, including a
music panel, which could be really interesting.
And then of course the wrap up on Friday.
So I want to thank all our presenters, thank
our audience for your questions, and please feel free to reach out to anybody who has
presented, we all like to hear from people who are interested in our work, whether
they agree with it or not, and really
great to see everybody today.
Thank you.