Besides being a dog in the manger
By Stephen Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada, March 22, 2009
Current copyright law and protection is stupid, an anachronism from the past. SCTV and The Second City proved that once again stupidity comes first with copyright. I wrote a story about how close we are to each other called Six Degrees of Separation using famous Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot as my connection. To test the theory, which ended up being three degrees of separation, I let my mind wander over all the Gordon Lightfoot memories I had. Do you remember SCTV the comedy show? Unless you see it in re-runs, you’d have to be 35 years old to remember it and even then it was a cult program with a small audience. Rick Moranis did a satirical K-Tel commercial – can you remember them? – for a record set of Gordon Lightfoot singing every song every written. I thought the premise was drole. Lightfoot’s dreamy style doesn’t fit all music so hearing him sing certain songs is musically funny. OK so I have a musicians sense of humour. I found a clip on YouTube for the skit after much searching and put it in the story hoping you might see that it was funny.
httpv://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=eSThKFtOC48
When I was checking the story this morning up came the notice “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Second City.” Who care’s? There are 2,460 video clips on YouTube about SCTV. Do they want to take them all down? What would be the purpose? Are they ashamed of the program or do they want to keep younger audiences from seeing snippets? The program is gone, history. You can buy the DVD’s but who thinks of that unless something reminds you it was funny, like YouTube.
A much funnier program Monty Python’s Flying Circus put all their videos on YouTube recently along with 34,000 fan video posts of the various skits. Monty Python would have an audience 10,000 times bigger than SCTV but it is again 30 years old. Who remembers them right? Well right after they posted their videos, sales went up 23,000%. That’s correct 23.000%. People were reminded of how funny the shows were and decided to own them.
Doing take down’s of YouTube doesn’t keep your music, video’s or books from being copied. It only keeps them from being popular. The dog is in the manger. Copyright means people work harder to copy your material or they forget about you. The old order is rapidly fading.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgECKj9LSH4
The Bob Dylan video is a classic example of control versus no control. I saw that CBC Quest program back in 1964 when Dylan refused to go on US TV until they let Peter Seeger on as well. Seeger was blacklisted in the 1950’s for supposedly being a communist. Unable to work in concert halls and on TV, Seeger took to the universities singing folk songs for pennies. Seeger’s decade starving in the wilderness stirred up interest in folk music among the students and created the 50’s and 60’s folk revival. The folk revival spawned protest singers who wrote songs that helped bring down US government over the Vietnam War. The folk revival also changed the songs we listen to. Dylan and his contemporaries wrote songs about real people with real feelings. If you aren’t writing songs today that are real, no one will listen to you.
I remember staying up late in 1964 watching Dylan on Quest. My mother didn’t approve of Bob Dylan, protest songs and she slept next to the living room where the TV was. We only had one in a house in those days. I had my face 6 inches from the screen so I could hear Dylan. It was the first time a boy in Halifax, Nova Scotia got to see him.
Having found that video on YouTube one of two things will happen. 1) I will look for the video to buy it as a remembrance of my life. 2) I will download the Bit Torrent if the commercial DVD is not available. Copyright protection robs artists like Dylan and the SCTV folks of income. Not my fault. It’s theirs own fault.
The dumber thing is the artists are not getting paid for their work. John Candy was involved in a long court battle to get paid for his work with SCTV and died before he ever got reasonably compensated. Copy rights are generally held by big companies who starve the artists, like Universal or Warner Music.
slats
The ironic part of the story is that SCTV did not pay too much attention to copyright when they made the show and now a large number of skits have to be left off of the DVD’s. It is a sad state of affairs. I am not sure who owns the copyrights to SCTV material but they certainly are not very sharp business people. I am going to go with “failed entertainers”.