Category Archives: Open Culture

Sharing is the ethos of the internet, and of my generation. Open culture is about embedding that in our society.

How to rebuild a working CanCon system

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I would like to share a criticism of the DOC’s talking points (see the bottom of this post), which were released in advance of the CRTC’s upcoming workshop on re-defining CanCon.  I intend to criticize because I don’t believe the talking points are adequate to address the crisis that we face as documentary filmmakers, and I believe that constructive criticism can improve them.  I also intend to make my critique without malice or anger, and without pointing fingers.  I don’t have any serious disagreement with what DOC has presented; the talking points aren’t wrong or harmful.  I simply don’t believe that they address the issue in a way that will be meaningful.

What is the issue?  CanCon is fundamentally about culture, which means it is about relevance:  CanCon is content that is relevant to Canadians.  As Canadian filmmakers, we have been in a fight for cultural relevance for at least the last quarter century, and we have been losing.  For most of my professional career, discussion around CanCon has framed cultural relevance as “discoverability”:  The need to ensure that the films we create are seen — “discovered” — by Canadians.  I will return to this idea later, but for now, let me just observe that discoverability does not ensure relevance.  In fact, discoverability assumes that CanCon (undefined) is relevant, and the problem is one of access:  Canadians simply don’t have easy access to their culture.  This is absurd.  Our culture comes from us; we can’t be separated from it so easily.  The separation is in fact a disconnect between CanCon — the films, the “content” we create — and culture.  In plain terms, the content we create under the CanCon regime is mostly — with a few exceptions — not Canadian culture.  Despite our best efforts, many or most of the films we create are not relevant to most Canadians.  Figuring out how to change that, how to make sure that the billions of dollars spent on CanCon produces films that Canadians watch and care about, needs to be at the centre of this conversation.

But it’s not.  The talking points the DOC has shared do not make either culture or relevance central.  In fact, they have very little to say about what Canadian culture is; they simply assert that, whatever it is, it is made by Canadians as long as we are the ones making creative decisions.  They assume that, because our films were made by Canadians, they are therefore relevant.  This is more or less the same definition of CanCon that we’ve had for the last 30 years.  It is the same definition that has seen the erosion of CanCon and the loss of cultural relevance for most of the creators working within the CanCon system.

Based on what I heard at the recent webinar, this is not an accident.  As I understand it, DOC’s position is that the definition of CanCon isn’t the problem, but our independence as Canadian creators is threatened by outside actors — primarily the streaming giants — who wish to weaken the ownership and control of CanCon by saying that it simply need to be about Canadians, regardless of who is making the creative decisions.  Therefore, DOC’s efforts are intended to ensure that CanCon funds are available specifically and exclusively to independent documentary creators.  In other words, DOC’s advocacy efforts are about money, and ensuring that some portion of the CanCon funding is carved out specifically for documentary filmmakers in a way that ensures it cannot be co-opted by the behemoth streamers and broadcasters.  This understanding is not reflected in the talking points, but based on what I heard in the webinar, I believe the talking points are intended to help ensure funding for documentary.  Personally, I don’t see the connection — I don’t understand how maintaining and defending a status quo definition of CanCon will bring money into our pockets — but this is my best understanding of what DOC is advocating for.

I believe that DOC’s approach misses the point.  Focussing on money, important as that is, sidelines any discussion of culture or relevance.  Yes, we are all struggling to raise money, and no, we cannot do our work without a reliable source of funding.  But money cannot buy relevance.  Money is necessary for creation, but it is not sufficient to create culture.  Our CanCon system has been assuming that simply paying Canadians to create is enough to produce Canadian culture for the last 30 years.  DOC’s talking points also make this assumption.  They are silent on the key point:  What makes our creations culturally relevant?  They barely mention the word “culture”, and they do not give any sense of how DOC thinks of culture, or what policies might support it — what policies would help make our work relevant.  They assume that the act of creation by a Canadian is enough to produce cultural relevance.

I believe this approach is backwards.  In fact, cultural relevance produces money, not the other way around.  When our films do generate enough attention to be culturally relevant, they also generate income.  They become commercially viable.  Perhaps there is some work to do to ensure that the money it generates makes it way back to us as creators, but the point is that the relevance comes first, not the money.  Thus, I believe that DOC should be advocating for a definition of CanCon that explicitly defines what Canadian culture is, what makes it relevant, and that explains how that relevance is generated.  I want to acknowledge that Sarah did talk about the importance of including a cultural element in the definition of CanCon in today’s webinar.  She said that she has heard this concern from many filmmakers, and she praised the fact that the CRTC is, for the first time in decades, considering a cultural aspect of the definition as well as an economic one.  I agree, seeing the CRTC single out culture in this way gives me a great deal of hope; it makes me excited to take place in their consultation.  And it makes me all the more frustrated that DOC’s talking points are silent on this point.  If it is true that this point is known and understood by many of us already, it needs to be reflected in our talking points.

If CanCon is to have any cultural worth, DOC (and Canada) needs a theory of where culture comes from and how it is generated.  That theory needs to spell out a definition of CanCon that is capable of creating films that are culturally relevant, and which therefore justifies government funding for CanCon.  As filmmakers and artists, we are supposed to be the guardians and creators culture, yet for decades we have struggled for cultural relevance and this struggle has worsened.  So, here is a theory:

At the most fundamental level, culture is something that is shared:  Shared values, shared experiences, shared food, shared conversations, etc.  Canadian culture is something that is shared by Canadians.  In our vast, diverse, cultural mosaic of a country, there are very few universals, so it doesn’t have to be shared by all Canadians, but it needs to be shared by enough of us that it, whatever form “it” takes, is recognizably shared by a Canadian group.  A piece of Canadian culture is shared by at least one, and preferably multiples of the many tessarae that make up our cultural mosaic.  Canadian culture is relevant to the extent that it is shared among Canadians:  The more it is shared, the more relevant it is and the stronger that piece of culture is.  So, the fundamental questions we need to be asking are these:  “What causes Canadians to share with each other?” and “What produces shared experiences and where does that sharing come from?”  These questions bring us back to the idea of discoverability, but framed in a more useful way.  They make us ask “What captures our attention as Canadians, and how do we choose to spend our time?” and “What do we care about?”

Solving discoverability means looking at the problem from the point of view of ordinary Canadians — from an audience perspective — rather than the creator’s point of view.  The question is not “how can we force Canadians to pay attention to our work?”, the question is “how do Canadians decide what to pay attention to?”  This question has an answer in the present day, but solving it requires a historical perspective.  In the present day the internet, and social media in particular, have come to dominate our attention.  There are many flavours of this, and no one entity dominates the attention of Canadians or of any particular individual.  But there are some powerful players.  We ask Google to direct our attention when we are looking for information.  We give social media our attention when we want to know what the people we care about are doing or thinking.  We rely on Netflix to take care of our attention when we are seeking entertainment and don’t want to pay attention to anything in particular.  I won’t go too much deeper into this; others have written extensively about this, and some of our members have made films about it.  Suffice to say, a great deal of our attention — and thus, a great deal of our culture — is being directed by what has come to be called the “attention economy”.

The attention economy is the answer to my questions about relevance.  As our social lives have moved increasingly online, it is the internet that mediates the things that Canadians share.  Our shared experiences — our culture — happen online and on social media.  We increasingly choose to direct our attention on the basis of algorithmic recommendations, and the things we care about are dictated by the people we meet online and the experiences we have there.

All of this is, I think, fairly obvious.  What’s perhaps less obvious is what these online behaviours have replaced.  We have forgotten how we used to direct our attention before the attention economy took over.  So, let’s look at that.  Before the internet, news media, libraries, and universities were our sources of information.  Our cultural leaders were journalists, editors, and professors.  Instead of social media, we were simply social (in person, by phone) when we wanted to interact with people, and we relied on tabloids and daytime television for our understanding of “who’s who”.  We had a star system of celebrities that dominated our attention in those media.  For entertainment, we had film and television, and the cultural relevance of those media needs no explanation:  it is the same cultural relevance we are trying to recapture today.

What’s different about the previous system is not the fact that we had different media, but the geographical boundaries and the way that attention was directed within those media.  We have always struggled to resist American cultural hegemony (i.e. we have struggled to form shared experiences that are uniquely Canadian rather than borrowing American or English culture).  Prior to the internet, two things were different.  One:  we had strong, protectionist rules around Canadian ownership of media outlets, as well as restrictions on concentration of ownership in regional Canadian markets and across different forms of media.  The ownership rules helped ensure that decisions about what was seen were made by Canadians, and regional market rules made sure that there were a multitude of competing editors making those decisions.  Two:  Our cultural leaders — our “influencers” in today’s parlance — were selected by a cultural élite, not by algorithm, and only partially by “popularity” (as determined by market success).  In other words, the decisions about who and what got to be on television — who got attention, and therefore cultural relevance — were made by gatekeepers, and their decision were driven more by curation and a sense of Canadian nationhood, and less by “data”.  Decisions about what culturally importance were made by actual human beings, who made judgments about what they thought was important and relevant.  While there were certainly market pressures at play, by and large, ratings and sales data wasn’t specific enough to know exactly what content was popular at any given moment, so programming decisions were driven by the subjective, curatorial instincts of those gatekeepers.  That subjectivity — the ideosyncratic biases, preferences, and politics of the cultural élite was the distinctive, formative basis of Canadian Culture — and CanCon.

It’s worth observing that Canada used to have more of a distinction between “high culture” and “low culture”.  High culture was primarily driven by the élite, especially at the CBC and by major news and political institutions.  Low culture was less distinctively Canadian, more market driven, and much more heavily influenced by American media.  Even at the peak of its relevance in the ’70s and ’80s, CanCon was primarily a high culture phenomenon, representing and consumed by only a minority of Canadians, and driven almost entirely by non-market preferences and priorities.  When CanCon adopted its current definition as “Canadian culture is whatever is created by Canadians”, that change was driven by a recognition that CanCon wasn’t culturally relevant to a large portion of Canadians.  But, the new definition of CanCon basically abandoned any attempt at defining relevance to the market.  It ensured funding for Canadians within that market, but it did nothing to ensure that the CanCon that was funded would be more relevant to Canadians than anything else the market produced.  Our high culture was eclipsed by our low culture, and our low culture has become almost indistinguishable from “Western culture” in any other globalized nation.  Modest as it was, the previous system managed to create culture that was more relevant then than our current one.

Let me summarize my “theory of culture”.  Culture is created through shared attention, and therefore the ways that we direct our attention dictate what becomes culturally relevant.  Canadian culture is created when Canadians pay attention together.  I hope this summary is intuitive and obvious enough that it makes sense and is uncontroversial.  The theory is my opinion — an informed one, I hope, but an opinion nonetheless.  I make no claim to its ultimate correctness, and I welcome competing theories.  But, whether it’s my theory or a different one, DOC’s talking points need to reflect an understanding of how Canadian culture works if it is going to have any hope of improving CanCon.

Having said that, a theory is not enough.  If we want a CanCon system that can create relevant Canadian culture, the theory needs to turn into policy and practice.  We need to recognize that our culture is being created by the attention economy.  If we want to influence how that culture is created, we need to regulate the market for attention, and that means properly defining that market.  In addition to the traditional players, broadcasters, distributors and whatever Canadian “star system” still exists, our attention is being captured, bought and sold by the internet giants.  We need to understand that, different as all of these businesses are, they are all competing in the same market as competitors, and the traditional Canadian media giants are being out-competed (for attention as well as money) by companies that are much bigger, which are not Canadian owned, and which are fundamentally uninterested in ensuring that the attention they direct produces a culture which is distinctively Canadian.

We need to understand what unifies this market.  It is a cultural market, not a monetary one.  Its medium of exchange is attention, not money.  Our attention is being bought and sold, either by aggregating attention and reselling it to advertisers or by offering paid content which is compelling enough to capture our attention directly.  It is a global market, not a national or regional one, and therefore the culture it produces is global, not Canadian.  And it is extremely concentrated, with very few players capturing the majority of the attention and the money that goes with it.

If we want CanCon that is relevant to Canadians, we need a system where our cultural leaders — our influencers — are selected on the basis of human, Canadian judgment, and where there are a wide range of regional and cultural tesserae represented by those leaders.  We also need a market with real national boundaries, and we need to decide, through regulation, when and how people can compete for our attention.  This means considering advertising, news feed or recommendation algorithms, culture, and other major ways that our attention is directed as part of the same market, and it should be regulated as a market.  It should be possible to take anti-trust action against entities that monopolize our attention, there should be tariffs for content that “exports” our attention, and rules to prevent people stealing or abusing our attention.

That’s a very big vision, and it’s not something that could happen overnight (maybe it shouldn’t even happen at all).  I’m not advocating that DOC should try and write those regulations.  That’s not something DOC could our should take on.  Rather, I think it’s important to understand that our attention (and therefore our culture) is being controlled in a way that is analogous to a market, and (getting back to the point) that understanding should inform the way that CanCon is defined.  Specifically, the definition needs to include the idea that CanCon is made relevant by attention from our Canadian audience, and therefore CanCon regulations need to address how that audience is formed.

In addition to the definition of CanCon, there are two other points that I would like to see DOC advocating for.  One:  recommendation algorithms need to be outlawed or regulated so that decisions about relevance come from human, Canadian judgment.  This is controversial (it’s a fairly important part of C-11), but it is absolutely essential, and probably hard to get right.  Two:  rebuild rules that restrict ownership and media concentration across different regions and media.  This is how we break up the broadcaster duopoly, and it’s also how we deal with the online advertising oligarchies of the internet giants.  Markets should be defined by metropolitan area, and violating the rules should require either divestment or paying to subsidize competitors in that market.  In my opinion, this would be far more effective at improving diversity than the current approach of trying to incentivize it on a per-production basis.  The best way to get a wider variety of content is to hear about it from a wider variety of places.
I’ve said a lot here, but I believe there is a lot more to be said on this issue.  I’ve presented a criticism and my own theory about how CanCon could be changed to make it more relevant.  I hope I will not be the only voice.  I hope my theory is a useful way to analyze our industry, and I hope that others with more knowledge and experience than me can improve and elaborate on it.  I think my policy recommendations in particular could use some development, criticism and fleshing out.  These are not fully developed policies yet, but I hope they are a good start.  And I hope that DOC is able to build off this criticism to develop a better theory of its own.  We need more than just the status quo to rebuild our industry.

These are the talking points that DOC has released, which my thoughts above are referring to:

  • Canadian content is content that is owned and controlled by Canadians.
  • Some of the key creative positions need to be Canadian for it to be Canadian content, such as the writer and director. 
  • Canadian stories do not need to take place in Canada: the fact that they are coming from a Canadian point of view makes it Canadian.
  • When Canadians are in the driver’s seat in terms of developing Canadian content, Canadian stories are told from our own point of view. Some non-Canadian companies may decide to develop content that resonates with Canadians, but as market-driven entities they cannot be relied upon to carry out our cultural policy. 
  • Canadians know what stories are important to tell. Canadian stories are often unfolding in our own communities, be these on Canadian soil or in our counties of origin. If we are not the driving force developing and producing Canadian content we risk losing content that showcases our perspectives, history and national / regional identities.
  • Documentary films are key to Canadian content as they not only tell our stories from our point of view, they are a living library of Canadian perspectives.

Copyright extension does not benefit documentary filmmakers like me

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Copyright is a long-standing interest of mine, so when Michael Geist noted that the Canadian government was consulting on the topic of copyright extension (from 50 years after the death of the author to 70), I decided I would write in to the consultation.

A couple points that make it easier to understand what’s going on here. One, the copyright extension is required by CUSMA — the updated NAFTA treaty that was re-negotiated amid much Trump-related drama a couple years ago. The decision to make the extension has already been made; the consultation is basically on how Canada should implement it. Two, the government has already consulted on this topic recently, when The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (aka INDU) recommended that recommended that copyright extension accompanied with a registration requirement. For whatever reason, the current consultation is ignoring that recommendation.

Ok, get ready to get down in the copyright weeds. This is what I submitted:

I would like submit a response to the government’s consultation on how to extend copyright terms to 70 years after the death of the creator, as required by CUSMA.

I am a documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver.  I both create and make use of copyrighted works as part of my profession.  I care deeply about Canadian culture, which copyright is ostensibly intended to protect and nurture.

Before I respond to the question of what limitations should be placed on the extension of the general copyright term to life + 70 years, I would like to make some pointed observations:

  1. I am currently nearing 40 years old.  If I’m lucky, I expect to work for another 25-30 years, and live for another 40.  Assuming I do, the proposed copyright extension for works I create in my lifetime will not take effect until sometime around the year 2110.
  2. Extending the general copyright term is immaterial to my ability to make money off of my work.  An additional 20 years of copyright protection that takes effect 50 years after my death does not benefit me in any way.  I’ll be dead long before I can take advantage of it.
  3. In the same vein, an additional 20 years of copyright protection is immaterial to the commercial negotiations I make with the distributors and broadcasters that exploit my work.  The expected commercial life of the documentaries I create is 10 years at best.  It’s a bonus if my work has a commercial life beyond that time frame, but no distributor I’m aware of makes a business plan for a documentary that counts on receiving revenue in the year 2110.  An additional 20 years of copyright protection that takes effect 50 years after my death does not benefit them in any way.  They’ll be dead long before they can take advantage of it.
  4. With the above points in mind, I hope it is clear that the proposed extension does not benefit *current* creators like me in any way.  It is unlikely that the currently proposed extension will be in force unchanged by the year 2110.  Perhaps it will be, but more likely a different regime will be in place, as legislation, including copyright, is typically revisited every few decades.  It is quite implausible that any current stakeholders are making business decisions based on a potential benefit that is 90 years in the future — no one is planning that far into the future, and trying to do so would be foolish.
  5. Thus, the primary benefits of the extension accrue not to current creators, but to the owners of works that were created at least 50 years ago (1970), but given that most works are created mid-life, the average is more likely in the ballpark of 90 years ago (1930).
  6. The percentage of copyrighted works that have a commercial life lasting 90 years is exceedingly small — 1% is likely an overestimate based on percentages of books that remain in print at the time their copyright expires.
  7. Thanks to the fact that copyright is fixed on creation, the percentage of copyrighted works that are created for commercial purposes is also very small.  The vast majority of copyrighted works are private, unpublished works.
  8. For the sake of argument, let’s say the percentage of commercial works is 10%.  Based on the previous two points, that means the percentage of total copyrighted works that are likely to benefit from the proposed extension is in the ballpark of 0.1%, or one in a thousand.
  9. Put another way, this means that 999 out of 1,000 works covered by the proposed extension would likely qualify as “orphan” or “out-of-commerce” works.  Obviously, this is a ballpark estimate.
  10. The proposed copyright extension has the effect of creating a commercial benefit that is useful for approximately 0.1% of copyrighted works.  This benefit comes at the expense of making it harder to access and make use of the remaining 99.9% works.
  11. Part of my work as a documentary filmmaker involves researching Canadian history, and re-using the copyrighted works that make up our history and culture in a way that makes them interesting and relevant to present-day audiences.  I am a creator of Canadian culture, and that necessarily means that I build on our cultural heritage, much of which is under copyright.
  12. The vast majority of the works I re-use in my work are “orphan”, “out-of-commerce”, or “noncommercial” in nature.  The most common type of “commercial” works I use are old newscasts that are primarily factual in nature, but are nonetheless copyrighted and licensed by commercial entities.
  13. The costs of clearing copyright — finding out who owns a work, when it was created, whether it is under copyright, and whether I can license it — form a significant portion of the time and money I spend creating.  This is particularly true of the time involved in tracking down and clearing non-commercial works that are not owned by professional copyright holders.
  14. Due to the fact that Canada’s cultural industries were nascent and small until the rise of CanCon in the 1960s, the vast majority of commercially significant copyrighted works that stand to benefit from the proposed extension (i.e. those created in the first half of the twentieth century) are not Canadian in origin.  Most are likely American, British, or French.
  15. This means that the primary benefits of the proposed extension are likely to accrue to non-Canadian entities — there are simply far more foreign works dating from the first half of the twentieth century that are commercially viable than there are Canadian ones.

Aside from it being a requirement of CUSMA, the stated benefit of the proposed extension is:

Canada’s implementation of its commitment to extend its general term of protection to life-plus 70 years will provide certainty that Canadian rights holders will benefit from this extended term in each of these countries, contributing to a more level global playing field and providing new export opportunities for Canadian creative industries and Canadian-made content.

Based on my observations above, I hope the following is clear:

  • The number of Canadians, and Canadian works that can benefit from the proposed extension is miniscule.  There simply are not many Canadian works produced in the first half of the twentieth century that have commercial value.
  • I would reiterate that the expected benefit for current creators is in the ballpark of 90 years in the future, and is not a relevant factor in either creating or commercializing works created today.  There simply are not very many “export opportunities for Canadian creative industries and Canadian-made content” that are enabled by the proposed extension, because the works that primarily benefit were created nearly a century ago, and most of those works are not Canadian.
  • A “more level global playing field” in fact removes a competitive advantage that Canadians have benefited from up until now:  Creators like me have more certainty about whether we can use works from creators who have been dead for 50-70 years, and we do not bear the time and labour costs of clearing them.  Creators in countries that have adopted life+70 must bear these extra costs.

In short, although it is clear that Canada is required to adopt some form of extension to meet its obligations under CUSMA, compliance with CUSMA appears to be the main benefit that Canadians are getting; on its own merits, the extension is arguably detrimental to Canadians, and especially Canadian culture, on the basis of the additional costs it imposes on Canadians who want to access the vast majority of non-commercial copyrighted works that will become less accessible during the proposed extension.  This is true whether Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs) are bearing those costs, or individuals who simply lose access entirely because the LAMs cannot bear those costs.

I hope it is clear that I disagree with the premise that Canadians are getting anything real of value from a copyright extension.  As a Canadian creator, I do not see how I benefit from the proposed extension, despite the fact that the policy is being promoted in the name of creators.  I do, however, see cost to me, in that I will have to put more time and money into researching and clearing the old works that are in my work.  For some projects, perhaps this cost would be negligible.  But for others — particularly those that dig into Canadian history and culture — they could be significant enough to influence whether or not I am able to make a project.

As I see it, the proposed extension offers a benefit to the institutions that happen to own copyright in the most recognizable works of the early twentieth century — most of which are foreign — at the cost of present-day creators, in exchange for a lottery ticket that can’t be redeemed until 50 years after I’m dead.  The extension is a transfer of wealth from the present to the past, and it prioritizes access to the 0.1% of commercially viable works at the expense of the remaining 99.9% of our culture.  This is the opposite of supporting Canadian culture.

With that in mind, I would like to offer my recommendation that Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada adopt the original INDU recommendation of a registration system for works to obtain copyright protection beyond 50 years after the death of the creator.  Why?  Because this option will cost creators, libraries, archives, museums, and Canadians the least when we want to access the 99.9% of works that are our cultural heritage.

This vast trove of cultural works are not economic to monetize.  For out-of-commerce and non-commercial works, that is true by definition.  For orphan works it is true due to market failure — any business that cannot be found by its customers is obviously not an economic business  Any licensing or clearance regime that is enacted to fulfill the fiction that such works are economically valuable (as opposed to culturally valuable) is almost certain to lose money — for the copyright owners as well as the licensees.  The overhead and carrying costs of making such ancient works available is not worth the minuscule demand for those works.  They are far more valuable to Canadians when there are as few barriers as possible to their use.  They are worthless without the work that creators, libraries, archives, and museums do to re-use and re-contextualize them for modern Canadians.

In truth, it is the 0.1% of commercially valuable works that are the exception, and a registration requirement would codify that exception into law.  A $50 registration fee and a few minutes filling out a registration form are a small cost to bear for a work that is expected to produce a commercial return, and in aggregate, $50 for each of the 0.1% of commercially significant works is a far, far smaller economic cost than the time and labour costs imposed by needing to clear the 99.9% of uneconomic works.

A registration system buys clarity:  There is a definitive way of knowing which works must be cleared, and who they need to be cleared with.  Because of that clarity, the orphan work problem goes away, and no difficult definitions are needed to determine which works are out-of-commerce.  Copyright holders can determine that for themselves, and if a work is commercially viable, a $50 fee is no hardship.  Such a system will simultaneously satisfy our international obligations, ensure that what economic opportunities there are can be made use of, and most importantly, it does not burden the 99.9% of non-economic works with the cost of allowing the 0.1% to be sold.

Of the “official” options, “Option 3 — Permit the use of orphan works and/or out-of-commerce works, subject to claims for equitable remuneration” comes closest to mitigating the problems of copyright extension.  Permitting use by default mostly mitigates the overhead of trying to clear uneconomic works, while still permitting owners of commercial works to negotiate licenses.  However, it would need to be modified to allow creators — and ordinary Canadians — access to our cultural heritage, and the non-profit restriction seems unnecessary.  Additionally, it allows the value created by creators, libraries, archive and museums to be appropriated by copyright owners.  In situations where very old works regain popularity and commercial viability, it is likely that the efforts to re-use and re-contextualize are responsible for the new value that is created, not any value inherent in the work itself.

In sum, Option 3 has its merits, but is still inferior to a registration system that would provide more certainty about what does and doesn’t need to be licensed, impose fewer costs on non-commercial works, and be cheaper to implement.  If “following international norms” is the only benefit to avoiding a registration system, that benefit is not tangible enough to outweigh the benefits of creating one.  If the Berne Convention is satisfied by a copyright term of Life+50, there is no reason to think that Berne’s requirements should apply to any protection offered past that term.

The Homicidal Bitchin’ that goes down in Every Kitchen

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…
From the homicidal bitchin’
that does down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
…
Democracy is coming
to the U.S.A.

Leonard Cohen

This post is inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, about how money is made of mass surveillance. I’m not overly impressed by the book, but there’s a section describing the Chinese Social Credit system which made me reflect on how we should determine — and how we actually determine — social status.

For the uninitiated, The Social Credit System is a “social score” that measures, in essence, how good a person you are (as determined by the Communist Party of China). It’s compiled automatically, without input or knowledge from the citizens themselves, on the basis of online behaviour: What you buy, who you communicate with, what topics you talk about. It’s enabled by mass surveillance, but the basic idea of keeping dossiers on social behaviour and using them for social control is much older than our current problems with online tracking. Think Stasi, the KGB, and all the stories of secret informants that came out of the Soviet era.

Essentially, it’s a government-run system of social status. Call it a class system (but don’t tell the Communist Party). By Western standards, it’s terrifying and Orwellian, and Zuboff’s description of the system is intended as a dystopia. She quotes the Economist to describe the systems social consequences:

People on the list can be prevented from buying aeroplane, bullet-train or first- or business-class rail tickets; selling, buying or building a house; or enrolling their children in expensive fee-paying schools. There are restrictions on offenders joining or being promoted in the party and army, and on receiving honours and titles.

China invents the digital totalitarian state — Economist — December 17, 2016

She goes on to describe the benefits of having a high social credit score:

Those with high scores receive honours and rewards … They can rent a car without a deposit, receive favourable terms on loans and apartment rentals, receive fast-tracking for visa permits, enjoy being showcased on dating apps, and a host of other perks.

Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p.390

Dystopian it may be, but it got me thinking: How do we distribute the rewards of high social status here in Canada? Who gets social privilege in our society?

The answer should surprise no one: Money. Money is our system of social credit. Only people with money can buy aeroplane tickets or houses, or send their kids to private schools. Perversely, having money will gets you better mortgage terms from the bank or determine whether you qualify for a mortgage at all! We idolize the rich and we act as though the ability to make money is the mark of superior person — the more money, the more superior the person. Not having money is worse — without money, we are deprived of any number of privileges and comforts, including basic human needs like food or shelter.

That got me thinking even more: Is determining social status though wealth really a better system than determining it through social behaviour? Don’t we want to reward the people who act in socially positive ways rather than just rewarding the rich? Does that make the Chinese system better than our own?

I’m not here to defend the Chinese system. I think it’s terrifying. I think most Westerners would prefer equality — a fair system would distribute housing and aeroplane tickets more or less equally, not according to social status. That’s the American dream: Freedom and equality. The ability to make it on your own, no matter who you are.

But I think that’s how we ended up using money to represent social status. We’ve persuaded ourselves that we’ve actually built an equal society, and in doing so we’ve made ourselves blind to the ways that social status is actually determined. We believe in our ideals more than the reality we live in. By saying we have no class system, we have ignored how social status is actually determined. Like it or not, humans are incredibly sensitive to social status, and even the most egalitarian, communal organizations quickly and inevitably create a pecking order. We cannot create a fair system by ignoring status. Somebody has to speak first; someone has to take the first bite. Social status is our way of figuring out who deserves those privileges.

So what are our options? How should we determine social status? What’s fair? I can think of lots of ways that have been tried. Money. Popularity. Age. Heredity. Beauty. Strength. Intelligence. The Chinese system, terrifying as it is, assigns privilege on the basis of moral quality.

On a practical level, we make status judgments on a person-to-person basis. We compare ourselves to each other, and decide for ourselves whether we are superior or inferior, and then modify our behaviour based on that judgment. There are dozens or hundreds of social cues that go into this judgment: All the factors I mentioned above and plenty more. The important thing though, is that it is our judgment. The terrifying thing about the Social Credit system is that the system’s judgment of our worth may not match our own. We may be forced into a status that does not match our self-image. Money is harder to argue with. We may not like the amount we have, but we know how much is there. I’m not sure that makes money a better measure of status, but it may explain why we are more comfortable with it. Or, perhaps we are just more familiar with it.

I’ve struggled to think of a fair way to determine status, and I’m not sure there is one. Our sense of status is given to us by the culture we live in, and it’s immensely difficult to try and change it. There’s nothing about our culture — or any other — that says status has to be fair. Our individual assessments of status may be self-determined, but there are any number of small social pressures that let us know when others disagree with our self-assessed status. If we “choose” a status that doesn’t match social expectations, we may fool a few people (and ourselves), but in the long run, we’ll inevitably come across as foolish or delusional (two very low status images) if we act too far outside our station.

I’m not sure how social status should work, and that bothers me. I started writing this piece because of an intuition that the ways we determine who deserves to be high status could be improved. At the end of the day, I don’t think wealth is a good way to distribute housing and aeroplane tickets, and the idea that they could be distributed on the basis of some higher ideal of social worth appeals to me. At the same time, the Chinese Social Credit System is too horrifying to contemplate. I doubt any centralized institution of social status could be fair or workable. But, if we don’t think consciously about how social status works, we will be at the mercy of those who do, whether they are Chinese software engineers or American capitalists.

Can Multi-Cultural Canada Tolerate a Prime Minister in Brownface?

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Well, isn’t this embarrassing. Our national election campaign has dissolved into a quivering puddle of racial angst thanks to a set of 20 year old photos showing our Prime Minister playing dress-up in various skin colours that don’t belong to him. His polls are down 1.268 percent in the national horse race, and progressive, right-thinking citizens are faced with a terrible conundrum: Do they condemn the Prime Minister for his thoughtless racism and risk letting the dreaded Conservatives take the election, or stay silent and endure the guilt of being complicit in the Prime Minister’s oppression of people of colour everywhere?

Forgive me for being glib. There’s a serious issue here, but I find it a bit hard to keep a straight face with the amount of overwrought vitriol that is floating around. I’m sure I will attract my share of it by the end of this piece, but please hold your fire for a moment and consider whether investing such seriousness in Justin Brownface might in fact be distracting from more serious and intractable cases of racism. This article in The Tyee lists a dozen examples of racism that are far more worthy of discussion than Trudeau’s 20 year old party photos. Incarceration rates and the number of children in foster homes, both of which are disproportionately high for indigenous people are two good examples.

Actually, that’s a false equivalence. The high indigenous population of our prisons is not the same kind of injustice as what Trudeau did. It is something else entirely. Both masquerade under the word racism, but they are otherwise completely different issues. One is an example of structural oppression. The other is a display of prejudice. The challenge is that the structural issues — the racism that is serious, worth discussing, and hard to solve — are less photogenic, and therefore less media friendly, than our Prime Minister in costume.

What’s wrong with this? Well for starters, the photos are an obvious dead cat. This being an election, it’s no accident that they emerged in the middle of it. They were timed to embarrass Trudeau when it would hurt him the most. Global News even quoted Andrew Sheer as the source for the video they released.

I have to wonder what the dead cat is distracting us from. Who is responsible for throwing it on the table in the first place? Aside from the obvious political damage to Trudeau, what else are they trying to achieve?

The situation feels a bit like revenge porn: Trudeau has been caught on camera with his pants down, and the evidence of his transgression is being published widely by someone with an axe to grind. Whoever tossed the dead cat has also crossed a moral line. Who is worse? If we extend the revenge porn analogy, the publisher is the true villain, but in our situation I suppose it depends on how serious we think Trudeau’s crime is.

So how serious is it? Earlier, I called it a display of prejudice to distinguish it from structural racism. Prejudicial racism is the racism we think of intuitively: Treating someone differently based on the colour of their skin. Prejudice is person to person; there’s a perpetrator and a victim. It’s not clear to me the Trudeau’s actions — or brownface in general — qualifies as prejudice. Who is the victim? The two smiling Sikhs who Trudeau has his arms around in the photo? Granted, he’s dressed as an Arab, not a Sikh, but there doesn’t seem to be much cultural tension in evidence. Perhaps there’s an offended Arab off camera, though putting it like that seems mildly prejudicial in itself, as though it were a stereotypical trait of Arabians to be offended.

Two real Sikhs and one fake Arab.

Offended Arabians aside, it doesn’t seem like brownface fits easily into the box of prejudice, and if the racism isn’t structural and it’s not prejudicial, then what kind of racism is it? At risk of exposing myself as a non-expert in racism, the best answer I can come up with is that the history of blackface in America has been generalized and exported. As I understand it, blackface was a theatrical practice that was problematic for at least three reasons: It allowed white performers to keep black ones out of the entertainment industry and reinforced segregation, it promulgated false stereotypes about black people, and it appropriated black culture to mainstream American culture.

The first reason clearly does not apply. The context is a party, not a performance; Trudeau isn’t putting any actors out of work, whatever the colour of their skin. The third doesn’t seem relevant either. It’s hard to be definitive from a photo alone, but the costume is so clownish it’s hard to imagine it’s appropriating anything. Only the second seems remotely applicable to Trudeau’s situation. He does seem to be reinforcing a certain false image of Arabians, but again, it’s so obviously cartoonish that it’s hard to take seriously. If I’m not mistaken, he’s dressed up as Disney’s Aladdin, which does have an issue with promulgating stereotypes, but that makes Trudeau more of a patsy than a perpetrator of racism. I think the worst that can be said of him is that he’s participating in a flawed aspect of American culture, which we have also adopted in Canada.

I don’t think it’s fair to eviscerate Trudeau for participating in American culture, even if that culture is a bit racist. Participating in culture is what people do. It’s automatic and habitual, and it seems unfair to attribute malice or poor judgment to Trudeau for acting within those cultural norms. It may have been deserving of criticism when it happened twenty years ago, but it isn’t enough of a skeleton in the closet to be worth bringing up so long after the fact. In this situation, the culture was more problematic than the person. I do think this is an excellent opportunity to have a discussion about how that culture might be racist, and that discussion is happening. But, I don’t see how 20-year-old brownface photos belong on the list of factors that should influence how we judge our politicians (and, by extension, how we vote).

The age of the photos is important. I wonder if these photos would have attracted a similar reaction back in 2001 when they were taken? I was in high school in 2001. I would say it’s a near certainty that something similar went on at my high school. Does that mean we were more racist back then? Maybe. Or maybe our ideas about racism have shifted.

As it happens, I can recall a halloween in Grade 2 where I went trick-or-treating in brownface. I dressed up as Prince Caspian — a fictional character from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. To the best of my knowledge, Lewis never specifies the good prince’s race, though culturally I think we can assume he is Christian and English. That means I (or perhaps my mother) added brown skin as a feature of the costume. What did it mean for me to do that? Was it racist then? Is it now? It’s hard for me to fit this situation into the racism box. I get zero for three when I consider the three factors I identified earlier: I wasn’t appropriating culture; the character I played was very much within my own cultural background (English). I wasn’t perpetuating stereotypes; if anything I was breaking stereotype by implicitly recognizing brown skin as belonging within a white literary world. And I definitely wasn’t taking jobs from non-white actors.

Perhaps I’ve missed something, or perhaps I need a lecture about white privilege, but I’m unable to find the racism in my brownface costume in no matter how I squint at it. I see it as something different: An expression of that great Canadian value, multiculturalism. I was taught that Canadian multiculturalism is distinct from the American melting pot because we celebrate our differences, rather than expecting newcomers to assimilate. The Canadian way is to have multiple cultures, not to homogenize them all into one. That’s a very high minded difference, and perhaps more idealistic than the reality in both countries, but I think it means something, and I think that something is important in evaluating both Trudeau’s behaviour and how we think of brownface in general.

That something is this: Celebrating our differences means more than just staying in our cultural lane. It’s not enough to just acknowledge our differences and say your skin is brown, mine is white, and can’t we all just be who we are? If we are to truly celebrate those differences, we need to understand what makes them worth celebrating; we need to experience first-hand what it’s like to wear somebody else’s skin.

Which brings me to brownface. I don’t know why I decided Prince Caspian had brown skin. But I do know that I was playing a character, and in doing so, I was learning what it was like to be someone else. That’s what dressing up is about. Did I learn anything about what it was like to have brown skin? Probably not, but the point is that skin colour was a way to make myself not me. The potential for learning was there. And that potential disappears if we consider it racist to play at being someone else.

If we are to be multicultural, we need to be able to share culture with each other. We need the freedom to adopt new bits of culture from people who are different from us, and we need the openness to be honest about how we perceive cultures that aren’t our own, even when those perceptions are negative or skewed. How can we learn from each other if we are not permitted to share how we see each other?

To me, this makes the Canadian context for brownface different from the American one. Blackface in America meant whitewashing black culture so it could be safely considered part of the mainstream (cultural appropriation). And it created a caricature of black culture that did not allow outsiders to truly understand the black experience in America (stereotyping). Brownface in Canada lacks such a specific history — our opinion of it is extrapolated from the American context. How would it look if we interpreted it in the context of Canadian multiculturalism rather than American history?

For one, cultural sharing works differently. Multiculturalism means there is less urgency for the mainstream to own all of its cultural practices. Canadian culture is fundamentally one of borrowing, and we like to acknowledge and celebrate the original source. And, while we are certainly not immune to stereotypes, our assumption that having multiple cultures is a normal part of being Canadian does mean we are used to dealing with differences, and that makes us conscious of when we do not have the whole cultural picture.

That’s a very black and white picture, if you’ll pardon the expression. Canada is not a multicultural utopia, and America is certainly more diverse than the myth of the melting pot would suggest. To some extent, both stories apply in both places. But, if the ideal of multiculturalism has any power at all, I think it’s worth noticing that brownface doesn’t have to be racist. And, if we believe in multiculturalism, we should also believe that acknowledging and talking about our differences can be healthy. Taking on someone else’s appearance can be done to mock and offend, or it can be done to learn and communicate. Or, it can simply be done in play.

In Trudeau’s case, it seems to have been mostly play. His brownface was not done maliciously, nor was it intended to offend. His costumes are cartoonish to the point of mockery, and I think if the photos have genuinely caused offence (and not just partisan self-righteousness), that mockery is the reason. It’s not hard to see the photos as disrespectful.

But I think we have now answered the question of how serious Trudeau’s crime is: Not very serious. Whoever leaked his photos for political gain deserves a harsher judgment than Trudeau himself. Of the ways his actions could be construed, racist is only one of multiple possibilities, and, if we choose to believe in the ideal of Canadian multiculturalism, it’s not the most salient one.

Who gets to own our culture?

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In honour of Techdirt’s World IP Day “anti-contest”, I’ve decided to write a few words about the relationship between copyright and culture.

Specifically, I’m interested in the question of who gets to own our culture, because copyright is the mechanism we use to answer that question.  Copyright — intellectual property — is the idea that when you create something — a photograph, a song, a film, or an essay like this one — you own that creation by virtue of being its creator.  You are free to publish it or to hide it away, to be magnanimous in sharing it with the world or to set up a toll booth and charge people for experiencing your creation.  All of those things belong to you by right — and that right is called copyright.  Thus are the seeds of ownership planted for all of the cultural artifacts that are created.

Culture is a different beast.  It’s also a very fuzzy concept.  When people talk about culture, they never quite seem to know exactly what they mean.  We often seem to think it has something to do with the arts — the “cultural industries” are the ones that produce things like literature and art and movies.  Or, perhaps it has something to do with having a shared language or ethnic background.  Or food.

What I mean by culture is this:  Culture is just the things that people share between them.  And, to the extent that they share things, they share a common culture.  Culture is the lingua franca that binds a particular group of people together, whether that group is a nation, a particular ethnicity, a company (as in “corporate culture”), or just a small group of friends.  Culture is made of the common experiences that bind a group together.  Whatever group it is, the most salient feature of culture is that it is shared within that group.

That feature puts it in direct conflict with the idea of copyright.  Because if culture is fundamentally about sharing, copyright is fundamentally about controlling who gets to share.  If you own the copyright on some cultural artifact — let’s say the new Star Wars movie — you control who gets to watch Star Wars.  By extension, that also means you control who gets to talk about Star Wars and what they are allowed to say about it.  Because, if you can’t watch Star Wars, you lose access to the culture that is Star Wars and the things you are able to say about it will be very limited.

In a very real way, owning copyright means owning a piece of culture.  And, with that in mind, let’s return to the question of who gets to own our culture.  Initially, copyright belongs to creators.  There’s an intuitive appeal to this arrangement; it makes sense that the originator of a piece of culture gets to own it.  But, in reality, it is not creators who own our culture.  In fact, much of the culture that matters — the culture that is shared widely enough to be known on a large scale — is owned by large media conglomerates.  Star Wars is owned by the Walt Disney Company, not by George Lucas.

Of course, saying that our culture is owned by giant media conglomerates is a gross over-simplification.  Copyright is automatic and universal, which means everything from the e-mail you wrote to your boss last week to Donald Trump’s latest tweet is covered under copyright as a potential cultural artifact.  And there are plenty of aspects of culture that are not covered under copyright at all — language and food being two obvious examples.

Still, there is something significant about the amount of control that media companies exert on our culture.  And that significance is evidenced by the phrase that I used to describe it.  Media conglomerates don’t just own a lot of culture.  They own a lot of culture that matters.  In crass corporate terms:  They make it their business to own culture that is worth a lot of money, and, if possible, to increase the amount of money that they can earn from that culture.  What determines which culture is worth money?  Or, put another way, what determines cultural value?  We’ve already answered that question:  It is the culture that is most widely shared.

That’s significant, because it belies the intuition we had about copyright belonging rightly to creators.  It’s not creators that create cultural value.  The value comes much more from the sharing than from the creation.  A moment’s thought will confirm this.  Of the immense number of copyrightable creations, only a vanishingly small number will gain any significant amount of cultural relevance.  Chances are, the e-mail to your boss has absolutely no cultural relevance, and neither does the gorgeous piece of art that you framed and put on your wall.  It is not the act of creation that makes culture; it’s what happens to that creation after it leaves the hands of the creator.

We are now in a position to answer the question we asked at the beginning:  Who gets to own our culture?  The answer is this:  The people who popularize it.  Media conglomerates end up owning a lot copyrighted culture because they profit from taking raw creations and promoting them to the status of culture.  And, generally, creators are only too happy to exchange their copyrights for money and a bit of cultural notoriety.

Having answered the initial question, we can now ask a deeper question, the real question, namely, if significant parts of our culture are owned by the media conglomerates that popularize them, is this a desirable state of affairs?  And the answer, I think, is an unequivocal no.

This new question — the real question — is a question about power.  The question is about who has the power to determine what is culturally important and which voices get heard.  And the reason why the answer is no, the reason why we do not want media conglomerates to own our culture is because their choices about what is culturally important are dictated by what makes them the most money, not by the merits of the cultural artifacts that they promote.

When Disney decides to finance another Star Wars movie instead of a biting satire of the political system, that decision is driven by money, not by artistic merit or cultural need.  And, as a business, that’s their prerogative.  But, just because that decision is good for Disney does not make it a good one for our culture.  And our culture is more important than Disney’s bottom line.  As a culture we need to ask:  Who do we want to own our culture?  Who gets the power to decide what is culturally important?  We can do much better than outsourcing this power to giant media conglomerates.  But … how?

They key lies in the mechanism for owning culture:  Copyright.  By allowing companies to buy and concentrate ownership of copyright, we have turned culture into a commodity, where one piece of culture is as good as another as long as it can be bought and sold.  In such a market, it is money that dictates cultural importance, not ideas or artistic merit.

What is the alternative?  One possibility would be to attach copyright to the creator permanently, to make creators the permanent owners and guardians of the culture they create.  The appeals to the intuition that creators should own culture, and perhaps they would do a better job of cultivating culture than corporations.  But, such an arrangement ignores the fact that cultural value truly comes from sharing, not from creation.  If we are to respect that fact, our culture must be owned by all of us.  Which is to say, it should be a commons, owned by no one.

If we want our culture to be a marketplace of ideas, where the best ideas rise to the top and gain the most cultural resonance, we cannot allow it to be a marketplace of commerce, where the most successful ideas are the ones with the most money behind them.  To achieve that, to de-commodify our culture, we cannot allow culture to be owned.  Once culture can be owned, it can be bought and sold.

To do that, our system of copyright must change drastically.  Instead of being a system of ownership — a system of intellectual property — it must become a system for protecting the integrity of our culture.  If copyright is about who has the power to shape our culture and whose voices get heard, it needs to vest that power in the people who are best suited to creating and improving our culture, and it needs to concentrate that power in the hands of the people who have the best track record of creating positive cultural change.

This means creators.  But, not just any creators; it means creators who drive our culture forward.  Rather than rewarding every act of creation with ownership, copyright should reward those who create culturally significant works with the resources to continue creating them.

The mechanism for this is not ownership but reputation.  Rather than controlling who is allowed to access culture, copyright should encourage culture to be shared as widely as possible.  After all, culture is built on sharing.  But, whenever a piece of culture is shared, whenever the stock of that culture begins to rise, that culture should bear the imprint of its creator, and the creator should be indelibly identified with that creation.  In this way, the creators of the most resonant pieces of culture will become culturally significant along with their creations — and will be in a position to reap the benefits.

Copyright would thus become a system for ensuring that social power flows to the most culturally significant people rather than to people who are famous for being famous.  Imagine a world where we had never heard of Paris Hilton but Marie Curie had attained equivalent status and social power.

Achieving such a system in today’s political environment seems … unrealistic to say the least.  And, exploring such a radical change to copyright in depth would like require a book or two (or a documentary).  So, in envisioning this new kind of copyright system, I do not expect to make it a reality.  But, in all the reading I’ve done about copyright over the years (and it’s quite a lot), I’ve often felt that the problems of copyright have been much better explained than any sort of vision for what copyright could be.  Perhaps that’s why copyright seems to have progressively become worse for culture rather than better.

So, in honour of World IP Day (though probably not in the spirit intended by WIPO), I hope I have articulated a vision of copyright that could enliven and enrich our culture rather than restrict it.  As imperfect as it is, at least it holds a glimpse of a better system.

Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?

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Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?

There’s a rule of thumb about clickbait headlines that says if the headline is asking a question, the answer is no.  Except in this case, the answer is yes.  Yes, Rogers is definitely selling your location data.  They are selling your location data even if you are not a Rogers customer; the fact that they run Canada’s largest cellphone network, and one of Canada’s largest ISPs gives them access to pretty much anyone’s location, regardless of whether or not you do business with them.

Who are they selling it to?  We already know that Rogers (and every other Canadian telecom) will give your location to law enforcement.  Michael Geist reported that

three [Canadian] telecom providers alone disclosed information from 785,000 customer accounts in 2011. Moreover, virtually all providers sought compensation for complying with the requests.

It’s not clear how many of those requests include location data, but I wouldn’t bet against the answer being “most of them”.  We already know that Rogers is selling your location to law enforcement.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.  Law enforcement’s ability to track your location is a scandal in its own right, but these days, it’s old news.  At least law enforcement has the (dubious) justification that it helps them catch “bad guys”.  But Rogers isn’t just selling to law enforcement.  In fact, they are selling your location data to me.

Now, just to be clear, I have not actually purchased any location data.  But I could if I wanted to.  The data is definitely for sale, and it’s not for any lack of effort on Rogers’ part that I haven’t made a purchase.

I run a small business. That means I’m on more spam lists than I care to admit, and I receive calls on an almost weekly basis promising to put my website in the top 10 results on Google.  Most of these are obvious scams, but recently I received a call from a more professional-sounding organization called Rogers Outrank.  For some reason, I agreed to a half-hour sales call to talk about what Rogers could do to promote my business.

I won’t bore you with the details of the sales pitch.  Suffice to say that they made the usual promises to put me on the front page of Google’s search results (something Google might be interested in, since their advertising partners are not supposed to guarantee natural search results), and they provided extensive tools to generate sales calls from those results.

One of those tools caught my attention.  You can see why in this screenshot from their sales presentation:

Outrank Call MapThis is a map of inbound calls for the campaign.  The red pin is supposed to be the location of my business.  The blue pins represent people who have called the number associated with the sales campaign.  You can drill down and get more detailed information about each caller, including address.

Where does this information come from?  My friendly Rogers salesperson had the answer:

So the map is really cool because it lets you see where your leads are going to be calling you from, so if they use a landline, or from a desktop computer, they track the IP address to let us know where that person is calling from, and if it’s a mobile, it’s tracking GPS.

The salesperson assured me I would get this information regardless of who their service provider was:

Same idea, whether they are with Bell, Telus, Koodo — whatever other providers they are — we make sure that when anyone with any sort of brand is looking for your service, our goal is just make sure they are finding you, regardless of whether they are a Rogers client or not.

Let me say this loud and clear:  This is creepy.  Rogers is selling me the location data of anyone who calls my number, specifically so I can make decisions about how to sell them my services.  As a salesperson, that’s really useful, but it’s not an option I should have.  As a citizen and a private individual, I don’t want my whereabouts to be available to someone who is selling me something.  I don’t want that information to be available to anyone, and Rogers shouldn’t be selling it — especially when I have no business relationship with them.

Now, a few provisos:

  • It’s a salesperson, so the technical explanation of where the information comes from may not be accurate.  For mobile information in particular, I think it’s more likely that the location data comes from tracking SIM cards via cell tower triangulation than directly accessing the cell phone’s GPS.
  • Likewise, the salesperson doesn’t say outright that I can get addresses for people who don’t use Rogers … he simply implies that “their goal” is to provide me with useful information.  But, the map is pretty telling, and I made a point of asking how reliable the information on the map was.  He was pretty clear that I could expect to get reliable location data for all my incoming calls.
  • They aren’t selling location data as a separate product.  Technically, Rogers is selling a marketing service, which includes location data as part of the service.  I can’t buy the location data separately.
  • Locations are for inbound calls only.  That means I can’t just ask Rogers to track a given phone number; I only get locations for people who I have somehow convinced to call me.  But, Rogers’ product is marketing.  Their service is specifically designed to convince people to call me.

So, is this legal?  I have no idea; I’m not a lawyer.  I’d love to hear someone like Michael Geist chime in.  My guess:  Probably, it’s technically, arguably legal.  Rogers has plenty of cash to spend on lawyers.  The fact that they are only selling data from incoming calls probably comes with some sort of implied consent.  I have no idea how they would get around the fact that non-customers’ data is being sold (and thus, there can be no contractually-waived rights), but lawyers are smart.  I’m sure they’d figure something out.

Is it ethical?  Hell no.  Selling my location, without my knowledge and consent is wrong.  I pay my phone company because communicating by phone is a useful, almost essential service.  I understand that that privilege entails letting my phone company know where I am, and, by extension, any other phone company whose customers I talk to.  I understand that it’s not really possible to build a phone system if you don’t know the location of the phones you are calling.  I entrust the companies that run the phone system with my location because it is impossible to build the system without that information.

Selling my location to external parties — making my location public knowledge — is a violation of that trust.  Rogers is taking advantage of me.  They are taking advantage of you, and everyone else who uses the Canadian phone system.  My location does not need to be public knowledge for the phone system to function.  It is being made public purely because it is profitable for Rogers to do so.

I wish I could say I knew what to do about this.  It’s easy to say “don’t use a phone”, but it’s hardly a practical solution.  It’s possible a lawsuit could help stop this particular practice, but that only solves this specific issue; it doesn’t solve the structural issue of abusing private data for profit.  It’s possible an industry regulator — the privacy commissioner? — might be able to do something if I complain loudly and often enough.

Honestly, I think the most effective tool is probably public shaming, which is why I wrote this blog post.  My hope is that other people — you — will read this, and agree Rogers is doing wrong.  And I hope that you will share this post with other people, so those people know what Rogers is doing.  Rogers is selling our location data.  Their public image should reflect the reality of what they are doing.