Winnipeg Free Press: Balanced use of copyright new cultural battleground

Winnipeg Free Press:Balanced use of copyright new cultural battleground  
Morley Walker   

THE main political fight facing the cultural world in the next decade will have nothing to do with accessing government funds or building fancy new facilities. It will be about copyright. 
Who owns what? And how much right do these legal owners have to control the means of creation and expression? 
  
Most of the debate so far has centred on the popular music industry.   
Computers and Internet technologies have given birth to a new way to disseminate music. It’s one that takes power and profits from the record companies who have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo. 
They are lobbying federal politicians to tighten legislation against music downloaders and even computer programmers. And their efforts are finding favour with the movie, television and publishing industries, which face many of the same issues. 
But many people in these and other cultural arenas fear that the pendulum could swing too far. Earlier this week, a coalition of Canadian art professionals took the unusual step of issuing an open letter to the federal ministries of Heritage and Industry.
They’re afraid the government, which has been promising new legislation for some time, will cave in to the pressures of the big corporations that want to maintain as much ownership as they can. 
Some 500 visual artists, curators and administrators have signed on to a manifesto they call “Appropriation Art.”   
They’re calling on the feds to adopt “balanced copyright laws that respect the reality of contemporary art practice.”  
The key word in that phrase has to be “balanced.”   

They make three essential requests: 
  
1) Visual artists must have the ability to refer to the work of others.   

2) They need a “fair use” provision in law that means they can’t be sued for borrowing an image of, say, Ronald McDonald in a collage, photographic spoof or performance piece. 

3) As all imagery moves into the digital domain, the laws should not favour those who can afford to invent anti-circumvention technologies or “digital locks.” 

The people who’ve signed this open letter, by the way, are not a seedy collection of malcontents and wannabes. They include Governor General’s Award winners and administrators of top institutions from across the country, among them Pierre Arpin, director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. 
A couple of years ago, Winnipeg artist Diana Thorneycroft made a series of drawings lampooning Walt Disney characters. 
She is showing them widely in the U.S. but has shied away from exhibiting them here. She is acting on legal advice that existing Canadian law gives Disney the ability to come after her for appropriating its visual iconography. 
The art coalition is clear about where it stands on this issue:   
“Artists work with a contemporary palette, using new technology,” spokeswoman Sarah Joyce says.   
“They work from within popular culture, using material from movies and popular music. Contemporary culture should not be immune to critical commentary.” 
The history of visual art is one long conversation with artists of previous generations. When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel and Leonardo da Vinci did the Mona Lisa, they, too, were commenting on their visual heritage. 
Artists in China today are as likely to be referring to something they saw in an art magazine in New York as commenting on repression in Tiananmen Square. 
Too much of the current copyright war focuses on the abilities of big companies to retain and enforce ownership of what their employees or contractors have produced for them. 
On May 14, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy essay on the future of the book in the digital age. Author Kevin Kelly lauds the American search corporation Google’s ambitious plan to digitize every book ever written in every language. 
He argues that material left off this vast information highway will be lost forever. And among those setting up roadblocks are publishing companies who own extended copyrights to works by long-deceased authors. 
These same concerns apply to the visual domain. It’s heartening to see a coalition of Canadian art pros join the fray for what promises to be a long and difficult debate.