Steamer1
December 7th, 2001, 02:15 PM
from Dec 6 paper,
And now for some real censorship
Terence Corcoran
National Post
Eventually the flap over Heather Reisman's decision to ban Mein Kampf from her company's bookstores will die down. And when it does, perhaps the Timothy Findlays of the world -- who equated the decision with Nazi book burning -- could turn their fabulous imaginations to real acts of attempted censorship. To wit: Bell ExpressVu's appeal Tuesday to the Supreme Court to stop Canadians from picking up foreign satellite signals.
Unlike Ms. Reisman's action, which at least has the merit of being a legitimate free-market private business decision, the great corporatist operators behind Bell ExpressVu are going out of their way to enlist the courts and government of Canada in a genuine act of censorship and media control. If they have their way, Canadians will only be able to watch television signals approved by the state. Forget Nazi Germany; think Berlin Wall.
Keith Spicer, former head of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, once said that "this country and the Western world have spent 40 years telling the Russians that it was immoral to block broadcast. We are certainly not going to start doing that in Canada. Canadians are free people and they should act freely."
Alas, that's not the view at Bell. To paraphrase Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, "Free people who act freely? Oh! (snort, snort) Mr. Veedle, that's so cute! No, no, no, you're dealing with the telephone company. We are not subject to city, provincial, or federal legislation. We are omnipotent."
Bell has been trying to pull the plug on foreign satellite competition for years. It even hired the RCMP on a mystery special contract to hunt down foreign satellite users and sellers. For years, in fact, I've been waiting for the RCMP to storm into my house, seize my U.S. DirecTv satellite dish, and drag me off as a subversive. They never have, in part because every time Bell went to court with its harassment cases, it lost. So now, as a last resort, it is appealing to the Supreme Court.
My dish is known as a "grey market" system, which means I pay real money for the service in U.S. dollars that make their way back to the movie makers, television stations and sports networks. I pay my copyright. Perhaps more than 400,000 other Canadians have U.S. dish connections, including thousands who pick up ethnic programs in Spanish or who, in the ultimate crime against Canada, watch the forbidden fruits offered by HBO.
It's impossible to tell what the court will make of the case. Sometimes it's even impossible to understand the case. But what Bell wants is clear -- a court decision that "would impose an absolute prohibition" against all Canadians from receiving foreign satellite signals. "In the new millennium," said Bell's hyperventilating factum, "the preservation of the value of television programming delivered via satellite can only be accomplished by regulating every person in Canada who receives and decodes such a signal no matter where it originates."
Think about those words: "absolute" prohibition and "regulating every person in Canada" who receives any foreign satellite signal. If Mein Kampf were an HBO film, Ottawa could make it illegal for any Canadian watch it. Come to think of it, in days when cross-border radio was hot, Bell would have sent out dogs to hunt down listeners tuning in to Wolfman Jack on WKBW.
Bell makes three key arguments. One relates to copyright. But since all grey market dish owners pay for the service, there are no copyright issues. If there were, the big film studios would be all over this case. They are not, because they know they are getting their money.
Bell's major claim relates to a muddled Section 9 of the Radiocommunication Act. It seems to be saying that Ottawa can regulate subscription programming signals from a foreign source. But one judge after another has looked at the section and decided the act is more than a little confusing and therefore a problem that should be resolved by Parliament and the government, not the courts. If Ottawa wants to ban foreign satellite signals, let the government write a clear law -- if it can. As one lower court judge put it, "In the end, the government of the day recognized, as does the present statute, that Canadian authorities are unable to control broadcasting which originates outside Canada's border. ... No effort was ever made by Canadian authorities to block the reception of such signals nor, in my view, would any such effort be legal."
Then we have Bell's over-the-top cultural nationalism. The "foundational issue," it says, is "the future of broadcasting in Canada, who regulates broadcasting, or will there even be any future."
To buttress the cultural case, Bell's lawyers concocted the following analogy: "If the purpose of the fridge is to keep the meat and vegetables and dairy fresh for the family, and neighbours are allowed to come by and keep the door open all the time and blow hot air in, very shortly the bottom line is there's nothing for dinner, nothing that's edible to eat, A family that cannot eat cannot be a family for long."
A country that runs policy on that analogy is a country that will choke to death before it gets to the fridge.
And now for some real censorship
Terence Corcoran
National Post
Eventually the flap over Heather Reisman's decision to ban Mein Kampf from her company's bookstores will die down. And when it does, perhaps the Timothy Findlays of the world -- who equated the decision with Nazi book burning -- could turn their fabulous imaginations to real acts of attempted censorship. To wit: Bell ExpressVu's appeal Tuesday to the Supreme Court to stop Canadians from picking up foreign satellite signals.
Unlike Ms. Reisman's action, which at least has the merit of being a legitimate free-market private business decision, the great corporatist operators behind Bell ExpressVu are going out of their way to enlist the courts and government of Canada in a genuine act of censorship and media control. If they have their way, Canadians will only be able to watch television signals approved by the state. Forget Nazi Germany; think Berlin Wall.
Keith Spicer, former head of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, once said that "this country and the Western world have spent 40 years telling the Russians that it was immoral to block broadcast. We are certainly not going to start doing that in Canada. Canadians are free people and they should act freely."
Alas, that's not the view at Bell. To paraphrase Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, "Free people who act freely? Oh! (snort, snort) Mr. Veedle, that's so cute! No, no, no, you're dealing with the telephone company. We are not subject to city, provincial, or federal legislation. We are omnipotent."
Bell has been trying to pull the plug on foreign satellite competition for years. It even hired the RCMP on a mystery special contract to hunt down foreign satellite users and sellers. For years, in fact, I've been waiting for the RCMP to storm into my house, seize my U.S. DirecTv satellite dish, and drag me off as a subversive. They never have, in part because every time Bell went to court with its harassment cases, it lost. So now, as a last resort, it is appealing to the Supreme Court.
My dish is known as a "grey market" system, which means I pay real money for the service in U.S. dollars that make their way back to the movie makers, television stations and sports networks. I pay my copyright. Perhaps more than 400,000 other Canadians have U.S. dish connections, including thousands who pick up ethnic programs in Spanish or who, in the ultimate crime against Canada, watch the forbidden fruits offered by HBO.
It's impossible to tell what the court will make of the case. Sometimes it's even impossible to understand the case. But what Bell wants is clear -- a court decision that "would impose an absolute prohibition" against all Canadians from receiving foreign satellite signals. "In the new millennium," said Bell's hyperventilating factum, "the preservation of the value of television programming delivered via satellite can only be accomplished by regulating every person in Canada who receives and decodes such a signal no matter where it originates."
Think about those words: "absolute" prohibition and "regulating every person in Canada" who receives any foreign satellite signal. If Mein Kampf were an HBO film, Ottawa could make it illegal for any Canadian watch it. Come to think of it, in days when cross-border radio was hot, Bell would have sent out dogs to hunt down listeners tuning in to Wolfman Jack on WKBW.
Bell makes three key arguments. One relates to copyright. But since all grey market dish owners pay for the service, there are no copyright issues. If there were, the big film studios would be all over this case. They are not, because they know they are getting their money.
Bell's major claim relates to a muddled Section 9 of the Radiocommunication Act. It seems to be saying that Ottawa can regulate subscription programming signals from a foreign source. But one judge after another has looked at the section and decided the act is more than a little confusing and therefore a problem that should be resolved by Parliament and the government, not the courts. If Ottawa wants to ban foreign satellite signals, let the government write a clear law -- if it can. As one lower court judge put it, "In the end, the government of the day recognized, as does the present statute, that Canadian authorities are unable to control broadcasting which originates outside Canada's border. ... No effort was ever made by Canadian authorities to block the reception of such signals nor, in my view, would any such effort be legal."
Then we have Bell's over-the-top cultural nationalism. The "foundational issue," it says, is "the future of broadcasting in Canada, who regulates broadcasting, or will there even be any future."
To buttress the cultural case, Bell's lawyers concocted the following analogy: "If the purpose of the fridge is to keep the meat and vegetables and dairy fresh for the family, and neighbours are allowed to come by and keep the door open all the time and blow hot air in, very shortly the bottom line is there's nothing for dinner, nothing that's edible to eat, A family that cannot eat cannot be a family for long."
A country that runs policy on that analogy is a country that will choke to death before it gets to the fridge.