#michael geist

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Chris Bittle Apologizes for Suggesting That Michael Geist is a Racist

Chris Bittle Apologizes for Suggesting That Michael Geist is a Racist

After suggesting Michael Geist is a racist, Liberal MP, Chris Bittle issued an apology for his remarks on Twitter. (more…)

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There is No Bottom: Chris Bittle Accuses Michael Geist of Racism for Pointing Out Racism

There is No Bottom: Chris Bittle Accuses Michael Geist of Racism for Pointing Out Racism

Liberal MP is once again making headlines for making deplorable comments. This time, he accused Michael Geist of being racist… for pointing out racism. (more…)

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Canadian Government Officials Pushes Another Misinformation Campaign on Bill C-11

Canadian Government Officials Pushes Another Misinformation Campaign on Bill C-11

With all arguments defending Bill C-11 completely destroyed, it seems that lying about Bill C-11 is all supporters can do now. (more…)

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Rest of Online Harms Submissions Wrestled Out of Government Via ATIP

Rest of Online Harms Submissions Wrestled Out of Government Via ATIP

A vast majority of the online harms submissions are secret no more. An ATIP request has brought them into the light. (more…)

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Misleading Information Being Posted By the Canadian Heritage Twitter Account on Bill C-11

Misleading Information Being Posted By the Canadian Heritage Twitter Account on Bill C-11

Liberals have been turning up the heat by throwing petty insults at Bill C-11 critics. Canadian Heritage is now involved. (more…)

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Michael Geist Publishes His Response to Online Harms Proposal

Michael Geist Publishes His Response to Online Harms Proposal

University law professor, Michael Geist, has now published his response to the online harms proposal. (more…)

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[breath-of-sunshine]

One Last Time - Ariana Grande (William Crooks/Michael Geist remix)

SO GOOD

[allanamayer]

The National Heritage Defeatist Strategy.

It was very kind of Michael Geist to take note of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy released earlier this year. Geist is a copyright scholar, in case you don’t know, and focuses on the legal restrictions keeping Canadian heritage institutions from digitizing and sharing important works that aren’t yet in the public domain- legal issues that are well-known and often discussed in the profession. 

What we also talk about a whole lot, which Geist brushes off in two sentences, is how poor we all are.

Seriously media, if you're writing things like "archivists should do this WHY aren't they?!" 99% of the time it's because of resource limits

— Eira Tansey (@eiratansey)

August 22, 2016

Since none of us can afford to be sued, it’s actually a very bold choice to dictate a National Strategy that requires the digitization of anything not firmly in the public domain and free of privacy or donation restrictions. (See this recent blog post if you’re in uncharted seas.)

Geist says “major digitization initiatives are certainly costly, but experience elsewhere shows that a government-led initiative that brings together public and private resources is possible with the right champion.” I sincerely hope Geist isn’t referring to Ancestry.ca partnerships here, and just means fundraising and endowments from the private sector. The country’s foremost copyright scholar, I’m sure, wouldn’t be endorsing digitization contracts that put publicly-held cultural heritage behind paywalls. Right? (He may also be referring to the Internet Archive, in the States, a vanity project funded out-of-pocket by someone who was made a multi-millionaire in the dot-com bubble of the early oughts. We should be so lucky.)

Geist goes on to say that, since Google can digitize stuff without fear of being sued, surely we can, too. Of course, the fine print of that legal decision (one that took years and years to set a precedent in the USA, and that would certainly need to be tested before being defined here, which would cost whichever guinea-pig organization was in the hot seat something in the way of hundreds or millions of dollars¹) says that Google was providing a new function, namely that of text-searchable books, heightening their discoverability.

Our meticulously hand-scripted, masters-level-quality, bespoke, artisanal metadata on all of our non-textual digital objects would in fact constitute no “transformative” use whatsoever, issuing us no copyright protections.

Also Google doesn’t let you read the whole book - just a fair-use-respecting portion of it. (Let’s see, so you take 90% of all heritage, multiply by one-sixth of each image, and one chapter of each book, and fewer than four bars of each song, carry the one ….)

We don’t have a precedent here for not being sued for sharing copyrighted materials, no matter how “out of print” they are, and we don’t have one on the horizon. Organizations are right to be afraid.

Geist also argues that the 2012 copyright “pentalogy” decisions, which broadened fair-dealing to anything for “research or private study,” would protect educational institutions, public libraries, and just about anybody else digitizing stuff and sharing it.

And, I mean, I agree. Keeping up with “Game of Thrones” is an important social-capital aspect of my life, and therefore any pirating I do of this show within hours of its airing is clearly research on how to be a non-pariah in my workplace. Duh. Therefore, as long as Canadian heritage institutions made users check the “I’m using this for research and private study” Captcha box before looking at their content management systems (and maybe a second one before download, y’know, just to be sure) who could possibly sue them? Right?

Of course, we can’t stick numbers on any of this - what it would cost, how long it would take, how much staff and equipment we’d require. This is because we don’t have current surveys or audits or estimates or even such things from previous years with which to extrapolate what we have now.

Literally no one knows how much Canadian creative or archival materials exist in heritage collections, let alone how many are in the public domain.

I asked people to assess their certainty on how much their organizations held as a control group and found that, at maximum, 70% of organizations were 70%+ certain of what they held in their collections². Almost none were 100% certain. We don’t even have an average guess at what archival backlogs are, except we know that ten-year-old unprocessed accessions aren’t unheard of.

The “bold vision” Geist calls for costs money. Money, money, money. Money just to get us all on the same page, get all of our accession records in one place, get all of our collection mandates in one place, get a platform for reporting the size and material type of our holdings, get Library and Archives Canada back into a leadership position in the industry, get private digitization vendors out of our shit, and get us thinking about what an accessible Canadian culture might mean. Money we desperately, insistently, expressly, notably, international-stage-cringe-inducingly³ do not have.

There was no increase announced for Library and Archives Canada in the 2016 Liberal budget, after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives slashed $10 million from their annual funding between 2012 and 2015. That’s a tacit approval of those cuts! Cuts previously used as ammunition! Heritage Minister Melanie Joly has yet to address this disastrous status quo, despite repeated attempts to bring up the subject.

Maybe we should start with “Why is there no funding available to meet this National Heritage Digitization Strategy?” before we ask “Why isn’t the National Heritage Digitization Strategy better?”

We might even conclude that the first question makes the second more-or-less moot.

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1. And yes, I have, on more than one occasion, suggested we take up a war chest so that some institution can go ahead and get sued and make the precedent, already. It got laughs at least twice.

2. YES I KNOW IT IS AN INSIGNIFICANT SAMPLE SIZE. But also, look at the 7th slide and see how most “fairly certain” responses varied widely, even when respondents were from the same institution. Certainty doesn’t guarantee accuracy, which is to say, even the people that think they know their collections don’t actually know their collections because they haven’t actually really truly counted their collections.

3. Librarian and Archivist of Canada Guy Berthiaume frequently refers in his speeches to how other countries have “failed” to consolidate their national libraries and national archives. This makes it sound like a difficult feat, a challenge that only the most Olympian of cultural-heritage industries could master. This is a gross misrepresentation. Other countries didn’t do this because it wasn’t good. We made everyone miserable by doing so. If you haven’t figured out by now that “amalgamation” is code for erasure, I can’t help you. (Which is to say, good luck, Singapore!)