Photo by Penney Kome, Calgary Pride March September 2013
Although some LGBT leaders urged a boycott on the Sochi Olympics due to Russia's draconian law against "homosexual propaganda", generally world response has been to treat the event as a teachable moment about celebrating all the different forms of human love.
Russia’s new law banning gay friendly “propaganda” accessible to
minors has sparked serious and humourous protests globally. Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision not to attend the 2014 Winter
Olympics at Sochi puts him in good company. Neither President Obama nor
Vice-President Biden will attend, nor French President Francois Hollande
German President Joachim Gauck or European Union Commissioner Viviane
Reding. On February 5, rallies in 20 cities worldwide protested outside the offices of ten major Olympics sponsors. In addition, CTV news reported
that, “A coalition of 40 international groups, including Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch, sent an open letter to the 10
biggest Olympic sponsors last week urging them to run ads promoting
equality for LGBT people.”
All the sponsors promptly re-affirmed
their commitment to human rights. Some specifically declared their
support for LGBT rights.
"Russia's law is harmful to LGBT
individuals and families, and it's harmful to a diverse society," said a
post on the AT&T Consumer Blog, under the headline A Time for Pride and Equality.
The
next day, Chobani (Yogurt) CEO Hamdi Ulukaya issued a statement "It's
disappointing that in 2014 this is still an issue," he said. "We are
against all laws and practices that discriminate in any way, whether it
be where you come from or who you love. For that reason, we oppose
Russia's anti-LGBT law."
As ABC News reported,
De Vry University spokesperson Ernie Gibble said, "We are against
Russia's anti-LGBT law and support efforts to improve LGBT equality."
Coca Cola announced its strong support for LGBT rights. McDonald’s
stated it supports human and civil rights. Visa said that it was
“engaged” with the IOC on “this important topic.”
Google changed the logo
on its search page, showing rainbow patches, each holding an athlete in
a winter Olympic sport, above a quote from the Olympic Charter about
human rights.
Late night talk show host Chelsea Handler inspired
rainbows over city halls across Canada when she ran the wrong photo –
Vancouver mayor Greg Robertson – while reporting the Sochi mayor’s
homophobic remarks. Learning of the mix-up through Twitter, Robertson
seized the opportunity to reiterate his well-known support for gay
rights.
“I’ve always stood strong and proud for Vancouver’s LGBTQ community, and gay rights are really important to Vancouverites,” he said.
Vancouver Council voted to send a delegation to Sochi to lobby the IOC
for gay rights, headed up by City Councillor Tim Stevenson, who is gay.
After Vancouver stepped up to the challenge, city after city across Canada voted to fly the rainbow flag
for the duration of the games, starting with St John’s, Nfld.
Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, and Whistler, among
others, are flying rainbow flags out front, as their mayors hold news
conferences to assert their cities’ support for LGBT rights. Toronto’s
Rob Ford is the biggest hold-out.
Then came the advertisements: Chevy’s Olympics ads include same-sex couples raising children Norway promoted sports with an ad that ends, “Whatever team you play for...” ; the Canadian Institute of Diversity and Inclusion issued a 33 second commercial with
two lugers rocking back and forth with a caption saying, “The Olympics
have always been a little bit gay;" and Britain’s Channel 4 re-branded
to a rainbow-coloured logo and launched a “Gay Mountain” ad campaign.
The
world seems to have seized upon the Sochi Olympics as a teachable
moment. Twenty years ago, such a public outpouring of support would have
been unimaginable. I am as stunned but delighted as I was the night the
United States elected its first Black president. As a Unitarian, whose denomination has offered same sex marriage in Canada since 1974, I honestly did not expect to see this
sea change in within my lifetime.
As well, there’s been a fierce debate on whether to boycott the games. In August, actor Stephen Fry wrote,
“An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is
simply essential.” George Takei in the States urged the same. Some
progressives shun the games completely – not easy to do in this
Olympics-soaked news cycle. Meanwhile, reporters have mentioned most
spectator seats remain unsold, for a number of reasons.
Conversely, other high-profile LGBT folks have urged gays to make
their presence at Sochi highly visible and as successful as possible. As
Susan Cole wrote in NOW, “gay rights activists have the chance to get unprecedented visibility.”
On
the other hand, one young gay man close to my heart is worried that the
news media attempts to support gay athletes could actually jeopardize
them. Everybody’s looking for a Jesse Owens -- the Black athlete who
won four gold medals at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics -- to prove Putin
wrong. This fellow pointed to the coverage of Ireen Wust,
who won two gold medals for speedskating. News reports mentioned that
she prefers to be identified as a Dutch skater, even though she is out
as a lesbian at home – in Holland, where people don’t pay much attention
to such differences.
Yes, every victory by an LGBT athlete
throws the hateful law’s lie back in the teeth of official Russia. But,
he said, “Right now the media are on a witch hunt for every gay athlete
who wins a medal. In effect, they’re identifying potential targets.” He
pointed out that Ireen Wust is still competing, still in Russia, where
speaking out for gay rights is against the law. Wust should be the person to decide how she identifies (she has won speedskating gold three Olympics in a row) and how much risk she wants to take.
Although
Canada lines up with the gay-friendly nations on the Olympics, he said,
LGBT communities at home usually see a different orientation. Somewhere
over the rainbow, the athletes will come home again. And now that all
of these companies, politicians, and celebrities have made this big show
of how much they support gay rights, he said, “it’s time for them to
live up to it.”
**** **** **** ****
Jesse Owens
won four gold medals in the 1936 summer Olympics, a record that stands
to this day. According to the Olympics website, “...Owens won four gold
medals, in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and the long jump. He managed
to break or equal nine Olympic records and also set three world
records. One of those world records was in the 4x100m relay. The
quartet set a time that wouldn’t be bettered for 20 years.”
Even
more remarkably Owens , a Black man, achieved all this in an extremely
hostile environment. The Ineternational Olympics Committee chose
Berlin in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
According to Wikipedia,
“Hitler saw the [1936] Games as an opportunity to promote his
government and ideals of racial supremacy, and the official Nazi party
paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, wrote in the strongest terms that Jews and Black people should not be allowed to participate in the Games.”
World
outcry forced the Third Reich to retract their outrageous request, and
a few brave Jewish and Black athletes did compete. If Jesse Owens’
extraordinary triumphs embarrassed the Adolf Hitler’s government and its
claims of Aryan racial superiority, other nations did not seem
particularly sympathetic.
Indeed, some nations urged the world
to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and forty-nine countries actually
registered athletes with alternative games in Barcelona. Unfortunately,
the Spanish Civil War erupted the day before the games were due to
start.
Russia was among the first
to announce it would boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympic games -- even
though the Third Reich retracted its original demand that no countries
send Jewish or Black athletes -- largely because Russia boycotted all
the Olympics at that time and instead participated in the international
workers’ games, Spartakiad. So there’s a certain irony in the way so many nations have turned
against Russia during the 2014 Olympics, on human rights grounds.
Unitarian Church of Calgary, Order of Service January 5 2013
In Rumi’s Footsteps: Sufism in the Modern World Service Leader: Penney Kome Guest speakers: Malik Muradov , Emine Gurbuzer Sound operator: Hendrik Schaink
Welcome (Board member) and Greet your neighbours
Chalice lighting:The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it comes from Beyond. If thou keep looking at the lamp, thou art lost: for thence arises the appearance of number and plurality. Fix thy gaze upon the Light, and thou are delivered from the dualism inherent in the finite body. O thou who art the kernel of Existence, the disagreement between Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew depends on the standpoint. (by Jalala al-Din Rumi)
Introduction: Why Unitarians should care about modern Sufis and the Hizmet movement Hello everyone. My name is Penney Kome. I’m a member of the Church Services Committee, and I will be your Service Leader this week. This year, our Sunday services are highlighting inspiration from other religions. This service is part of that series. We’ll project the text of the service on the screen here, as a guide, but not necessarily as word-for-word text for what we are going to say.
Today, we are very fortunate to have two guest speakers from the Intercultural Dialogue Institute, an organization with branches across Canada. With me at the front are Mr Malik Muradov, Executive Director of the Calgary branch, and Ms Emine Gurbuzer, head of the local women’s section.
Being able to introduce these two long time Calgarians to this congregation brings me special pleasure because I think our two faiths hold many principles in common. The IDI vigorously promotes interfaith dialogue and religious freedom, which are causes dear to many Unitarian hearts.
The Calgary IDI often hosts events, celebrating occasions like International Women’s Day, or Black History Month, which draw people from communities all over Calgary, often including local politicians. The group is also closely connected to the global Islamic Hizmet peace movement, which promotes education and religious tolerance in 140 countries around the world. The word Hizmet means, “service for the common good,” and I suggest it corresponds to our Unitarian commitment to live our faith.
“Hizmet” is another name for the Gülen movement, which began with writer and former Imam Fethullah Gülen’s modest effort to connect struggling post-secondary students with volunteer university students – in other words, to give a few local kids some free tutoring. Decades later, Gülen leads an international network of non-profit private and public schools, many funded mostly or completely by donations. These educational initiatives have earned him a fair amount of influence in his native Turkey, especially among Turkey’s media, judiciary, and civil servants who obtained their training this way.
Last April, TIME Magazine named Gülen one of the 100 most influential people in the world – noting that as “the most potent advocate of moderation in the Muslim world, Gülen is waging an urgently important campaign.” The Economist reported in 2008 that, “With his stated belief in science, inter-faith dialogue and multi-party democracy, Mr Gülen has also won praise from many non-Muslim quarters.”
Lately, Fethullah Gülen has clashed openly with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, even though (according to the Christian Science Monitor) a decade ago, the two of them worked together on legal challenges that broke the military government’s hold on power. Now Erdogan's government is reeling from allegations of graft and corruption, including plans to move against some of Hizmet's schools. As a journalist, I think Fethullah Gülen is a story! As a Unitarian, I think any struggle between a spiritual leader and a government deserves careful examination.
Finally, of course, most Unitarians know at least a little about the immortal Sufi poet, Rumi. He was born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan, forced to flee the Mongols as a toddler (with his family) and therefore raised in Turkey. Writing in Persian, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi crafted verses that have influenced all of Persian, Arab and Muslim literature and other arts across the centuries. His is called “the ecstatic faith,” the faith of falling in love with the divine over and over again, in both its divine and human form.
Rumi’s poems dare us to test ourselves and our senses, to think outside convention. Most of us have heard the famous line from one of his poems that offers, “...Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there” -- a deliberately shocking invitation to liberate ourselves to follow our joy. Similarly, the whirling dervishes remind us that everything in the world is whirling with the force of love.
Those are my main reasons for inviting Malik and Emine here to speak with me before this beloved community. Please make yourselves comfortable and join us in looking at Rumi's Light.
Story for all – Nasreddin Hoca story Emine Gurbuzer
Sing children out: Go now in peace, go now in peace. May the spirit of love surround you, everywhere, everywhere, you may go.
Emine Gurbuzer “...Faith makes a believer a person who inspires trust to one’s environment, even to the entire creation. It makes one’s narrow world into a universal one. True Muslims see the universe as a cradle of amity, and thus see everybody as brothers and sisters to a certain extent. As Ali ibn Abi Talib stated, they see others as brothers and sisters, Muslims being in faith and others being in humanity. Surely, their perspective of believers is very different, owing to the belief that they will be together in the intermediary realm, on the Day of Judgment, and the final reckoning.
“...People with such faith will not reduce their relationship with their environment to opportunistic expectations from others; on the contrary, they will try to establish a bond and relationship that will continue in the next world as well. If such a bond and relationship have a different value in God’s sight, then this will let believers become closer to God and make them succeed in both worlds, which is another promise made by faith.
“It is possible to see the Prophet’s blessed statement, “God’s hand (of support) is with the community,” from this perspective as well. That is, as God Almighty protects people who act with a collective spirit in this world from evils and grants them success, He will grant exceptional blessings to them altogether. In other words, acting in the collective yields not only worldly fruits, but otherworldly ones as well....” (excerpted from Fethullah Gülen)
Malik Muradov on why dervishes whirl, seeking to dissolve into the infinite
Offering: This congregation meets 100% of its expenses from free will donations. Let there be an offering to sustain and strengthen this place which is sacred to so many of us, a community of memory and of hope, for we are now the keepers of the dream.
(Brandoch L. Lovely)
If you have a Life Milestone to share with the congregation, please write it on a green card and put it in the offering basket, for someone from the Caring Committee to read from the front. After the basket passes you, you may come forward and light a silent candle of joy or concern, here at the sides. Meanwhile, please enjoy this video about Turkish marbling art
Caring committee report on congregational joys and concerns
Meditation: The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. Rumi
Conversation: PK, MM, EG with questions and answers about the IDI, Fethullah Gulen, Rumi, and Noah's Pudding
Question: After 9/11 and ever since, I have seen and read stories that
describe Muslims as scary people, people that Westerners will inevitably
have to fight in what Samuel Huntington described as a “Clash of
Civilizations”. My question to you is, do the Muslims you know think
that Westerners are scary people too?
Question: I think some Christian organizations might be worried that dialogue
could lead to some of their members converting to Islam. Does IDI try to
convert people? What’s the purpose of stimulating dialogue?
Question: What
kinds of reactions do you get from inviting dialogue? Question: If you want to do good work, why don’t you feed the hungry instead of sitting around and talking?
Question: Why does Fethullah Gülen call his blog The Broken Jug?
Question: What is Noah's Pudding?
Hymn # 180 Alhamdulillah Arabic Allelulia (Round)
Extinguish chalice with Closing words – #474: Unto the church universal
Unto the church universal, which is the depository of all ancient wisdom and the school of all modern thought;
Which recognizes in all prophets a harmony, in all scriptures a unity, and through all dispensations a continuity;
Which abjures all that separates and divides, and always magnifies all that unifies and brings peace;
Which seeks truth in freedom, justice in love, and individual discipline in social duty;
And which shall make of all sects, classes, nations, and races, one global community;
Unto this church and unto all its members, known and unknown throughout the world,
We [those of us present who agree with the goals above] pledge the allegiance of our hands and hearts. (Keshab Chandra Sen/Arr. John Haynes Holmes)
Good morning! Thanks for coming out this morning. My name is Penney Kome and I will be your Service Leader. I've chosen this method of presenting my talk today to help make it as accessible as possible, and also to show that, even though my career as a professional writer started back when a portable typewriter was a novelty, I'm not a Luddite.
Creativity and the arts enrich all our lives. In whatever form we engage with a transformative rendering of a world we thought we knew, and to whatever degree of participation, creativity has the power to bring us to our higher selves, to plug us into the joyous "flow" energy of being fully present. Creativity nourishes our hearts, our souls, our spirits.
The question I bring to the table today, though, is whether creativity can nourish the body.
Chalice lighting: I light the chalice with these words by Rev Andy Pakula:
We light this chalice flame as a sign of our faith
May we ever trust
The good light within each heart
The sacredness of life
The transformative force of love
And our own power to make a difference.
Homily
Imagine that one day you share your favorite pet story with an email list, or a blog. Now imagine that a year later you tell that same story to a new friend, and she laughs in your face "You can't fool me," she says, "You got that from a book." She pulls out her Kobo reader -- and there's your anecdote in a collection of postcard stories, but without your name attached. How would you feel?
Or imagine that one day you capture a sweet video of snowboarding on the mountains, and you post it to YouTube, and you’re so excited about being able to share it with everybody, you click on the Creative Commons license. And your video goes viral.
Now imagine that Kokanee beer’s advertising agency comes along and uses your video for a whole new series of ads. All your friends think you must be rich from the ad, but the fact is, the Creative Commons license pretty well put your video into the public domain. People are supposed to attribute the work to you -- or rather, your YouTube handle -- but that's hard to enforce. How would you feel?
Odds are that you would feel at least a little bit ripped off. And you’d be right. Information is the most valuable commodity on the Internet, and also the most likely to be, ahem, re-purposed, with or without permission. Remember Stephen Brill's Contentville?
Some people are happy to contribute their creations towards a greater whole, hoping to build a more co-operative world online. Sometimes that works. However, most of the Internet I've seen (as a newsmagazine editor) is actually a pretty competitive place, with uncountable players scrambling to figure out a way to monetize this new medium.
If "infomation wants to be free", as some say, then the question is, how do you define "information"? Facts? Stark facts usually need some interpretation. And there's the rub. Even sheets of statistics have to be composed in some kind of order.
What we're talking about here -- your pet story, your snowboarding video -- is not "information" but the "fixed expression" of ideas, emotions, juxtapositions and depictions.
A "fixed expression" is covered by copyright the very moment that it's fixed. Like the little girl who was delighted to learn she'd been speaking prose all her life, we all commit acts of copyright every day. If only someone would pay us for them. Here's a writers' joke:
Q: "How do you know if you're a real artist?" A: "Someone else is making more money from your work than you are."
But of course, most workers could say the same thing.
The evolution of copyright
The law that protects original work has been evolving almost continuously since its inception. Copyright emerged in the English speaking world with the 1709 Statute of Queen Anne, "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning,” to give printers incentive to publish original works.
Johannes Gutenberg gave the world moveable type. Exclusivity – even temporary exclusivity – gave printers time to recover the investment involved in actually printing books, which included paying the author.
Other countries besides England adopted their own copyright laws, each according to the cultural policy of the state. English copyright law started with the printers, some of whom went on to become publishers. So English common law tends to favour the producer rather than the creator. French copyright law (and most European copyright law) emphasizes droite d'auteur, author's rights, giving the creator primary and sometimes total control over the work. The 2002 German Copyright Act, for example, said that copyright was transferable only by inheritance.
Author Charles Dickens was one of many early Unitarians who earned their livelihoods with their creativity. Others included Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, e.e.cummings, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Beatrix Potter, and Charles Bulfinch.
Tension soon arose because copyright was a national law, and didn’t apply outside national borders. Dickens complained bitterly about American printers who reprinted and sold his work without permission or compensation. He even said publicly that Sir Walter Scott would not have died poor had the Americans paid him for using his work.
French author Victor Hugo founded L’association littéraire et artistique internationale to campaign for what eventually became the 1886 Berne Convention, an international agreement to give all authors “national treatment” – that is, to honour their copyright across borders.
The United States never did sign the Berne Convention, though. The US stood accused of harbouring pirates for almost three-quarters of a century, until they and the rest of the world signed the 1952 Universal Copyright Convention. But then according to Wikipedia, "on March 1, 1989, the U.S. "Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988" came into force and the United States became a party to the Berne Convention, making the Universal Copyright Convention obsolete."
Today, copyright has grown into a mighty forest of oak trees that shelters an entire ecosystem, a $46 billion cultural industry. Besides literature, the term "copyright" covers a wide range of intellectual property from software to music, and each sector has its own approach.
An early rebellion against Microsoft, for example, led to the Gnu, or free software movement. I admire people who can speak with computers. If people want to share their software, that's okay with me, as long as they practice safe techniques. ;) I do think that comparing software to literature is a false analogy, though. Booksellers are not going to take over the world, even the electronic world.
With music, iTunes has managed to recoup some of the market damage (an estimated $10 billion a year) from Napster and other peer-to-peer sharing sites. iTunes addresses the concerns that prompted file sharing, by making purchases easy, affordable and the right thing to do. But how many major breakout music stars have you seen since P2P sharing began?
Well, perhaps democratization of media is a good thing. Youtube can be as entertaining as any situation comedy, right? Now that everybody has the electronic tools at our fingertips to record our every waking moment, now that anyone can be a reality TV star, everybody's a producer. Everybody is a journalist. Everyone can broadcast their most private moments. Right?
Hmm. Let's turn the analogy around. Suppose you gave an axe and a power saw to the next person you saw, would that make that person a lumberjack? No, of course not. (And even if it did, a weekend lumberjack is rarely as expert as someone who does the job every day.) A lumberjack needs skills, and needs to understand the dangers of the work. So does anyone who wants to live by producing intellectual property.
The kind of intellectual property I know best is print, which as everybody knows, is in the midst of a tremendous transition. My nomination for Word of the Digital Century: disintermediation.
Dis - inter - media - tion
The term means the disappearance of intermediaries, usually as a result of new technology. Telegraph operators were obsolete once the telephone arrived. Online airline booking has all but eliminated travel agents. Email and couriers now handle most of our correspondence, as shown during the recent postal strike. Occupation after (skilled, well-paid) occupation has succumbed to digital competition.
Writing and publishing are in unprecedented upheaval, even for a normally volatile industry. Technological changes offer exciting new opportunities and techniques, accompanied by the risk of massive job loss. In the print world, four or five occupations are jostling each other to be the occupation that does not go extinct.
So far, the ISPs seem to be winning. Have you ever noticed? Internet Service Providers sell the online resources as a free all-you-can-eat buffet -- once you pay their steep monthly cover charge, on which their profits run an estimated 50 to 95 percent. But they rarely pay anything towards producing that buffet, beyond their own company websites.
What they are actually selling is connectivity. But marketing promises about all the goodies available on the Web only reinforce the public impression that all Publicly Available Materials (PAM) -- that is, anything not behind a paywall -- may be reproduced freely.
In early days, the Internet was sometimes called, "The library on your desk". Cannibalizing that library is one way to populate websites with continuously fresh material. Publishers are trying to minimize costs and maximize profits by re-using every scrap of text they have, aggregating, disaggregating, and re-purposing material.
Apart from the ideologues in the business (such as Rupert Murdoch or Conrad Black) publishers are sticking to commercial packages and concentrating on how many ways they can package those.
But whenever a product is used for something other than its own worth -- as in the publisher/bookseller battle over E-book prices, where the real goal is for the bookseller to sell E-book readers -- then the product itself loses value. This is often the case in marketing.
Payment for periodical writing (newspapers and magazines) in Canada has plummeted, from as much as $1500 for a thousand well-chosen words, to, well, free. The largest online purchaser of writing, Demand, pays $15 for an information piece that length. Fifteen dollars! And most publishers are demanding all rights for print and online media, as well as archiving.
Conversely, writers are seeking ways to survive without publishers. Writers have had to do for themselves (or pay for) many of the services publishers used to provide, such as editing, indexing, and most of all, promotion. No wonder self-publishing sounds more and more attractive to many, if only for self-defence.
In addition, the average shelf life of a book these days is three to six months -- hardly long enough to find its audience. The Writers' Union now has a Print On Demand (POD) service called Phoenix Books, so that writers can reprint their own books to sell at readings and events.
Disintermediation also puts at risk other occupations (and businesses) that might not spring to mind right away, such as booksellers and librarians. When all the books are e-books, no one will need to browse in a book boutique, or visit a hushed hall among the stacks.
Let's face it: the future is digital. Although they have some surprisingly sophisticated features, books are low tech. Profligate use of paper is environmentally unfriendly. The publishing industry has come to the brink of ruin more than once because of its precarious business model of paying for shipping, warehousing, and returns.
Apart from books as art objects, paper's time has passed. Paperbacks will be for poor people and collectors, while those who can afford to carry smaller devices will use e-book readers.
Some artists like to believe their work will be their legacy. Emily Dickinson's dresser full of secret poems brought her post-mortem fame. Folklorist Edith Fowke pays part of The Writers' Union's bills every year, although she died in 1996. Her will left TWUC the royalties for her volumes of collected Canadian folklore.
However, while they are alive, creative people do need to pay for bread and shelter. Some hold day jobs. Some marry supportive spouses. I'm fortunate. While fees for writers have dropped, demand for editors has increased. Funny correlation, eh?
Some 600,000 knowledge workers find employment in Canada's very significant cultural industry, currently valued at $46 billion a year. Cultural workers tend to earn less than workers in other industries, but report more job satisfaction.
The foundation of the publishing industry rests on writers, who earn an average $22,000 a year from their writing (although apparently some textbook writers can earn $60-80,000 a year). Everyone above them in the pyramid earns more. Most of the other people in the business have regular paycheques, and benefits such as pension plans, and -- until recently -- some job security.
Writers have had to fend for ourselves in the great jostling match. Author Heather Robertson spearheaded two decade-long lawsuits over electronic rights, and won sizeable settlements -- one of which was paid out last year, and one of which is in the logistics phase. Writers are also banding together in co-ops, collectives, and even the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU, for short) to protect their income.
I am very familiar with some of these organizations, especially one collective.
Way back in the early 1980s, when I wrote a national column on women's issues, I ran into a professor in women's studies who just gushed over me. "I love your work so much," she said, "I've created an entire course pack full of your columns." That is, she had the university bookstore copy my columns wholesale. Seeing the look on my face, she added quickly, "It's all right. I got permission from the magazine."
"Actually," I said, "the rights still belong to me. Next time, could you please contact me directly?" I gave her my business card. She stared at it, puzzled. "Why is your name spelled wrong on your card?" she asked. Sure enough, that professor (who was a delightful woman and eventually became a good friend) not only reproduced my work without permission, she'd spelled my name wrong on every article.
I felt ripped off. I felt worse than ripped off -- I felt violated, and not for the first or last time. And I wondered why a university professor didn't understand the basic concepts of copyright.
Moral rights include the right to a credit every time the work is used, and the right to refuse to allow your work to be used in way that undermines the integrity of the work.
The copyright holder has the exclusive right to reproduce and authorize reproduction, public performance, publication, adaptation, translation and to communicate to the public by telecommunication (eg, the Internet).
So widespread was the use of magazine articles that writers' organizations lobbied to change the Copyright Act, to allow for collectives to collect royalties on photocopies. The print collective, Cancopy, began in 1988, and changed its name to Access Copyright ten or twelve years ago.
On average, a creator who affiliated with Access Copyright at the beginning, and collected only the repertoire payment, would have received more than $10,000 over the past 20 years, mostly for allowing educators to reproduce their work for classroom use. Coincidentally, Access now has more than 10,000 creator affiliates in English Canada. (Quebec writers usually affiliate with Copibec.)
I was elected to the Access Copyright Board in 2004, so at this point, I've served on the Board for six years. In 2008, the peak year, Access collected $35 million in license fees and distributed most of that money to the rightsholders as royalties. Revenues have dropped since then, as I'll discuss in moment.
But there are obvious hazards to a business based on photocopying, in the Age of Digitization. With an eye to creating a permanent structure, I was point person in setting up the Access Copyright Foundation, with an endowment we expect to reach $5 million, and a mandate to distribute grants annually to small publishers and individual creators. Last year, the foundation distributed about $300,000 to about 120 Canadian creators and small publishers.
The conundrum of intellectual "property"
Now, people usually have one of two reactions to the word "copyright". Either their eyes glaze over, or they have very strong opinions on the subject.
Some people object to corporate domination of music and software, which often seem much too expensive for what they offer ($25 for a 25-cent CD? Really?) They say things like, "The artist doesn't see a cent of the money anyway." Others say that every piece of writing is based on the writing that went before, which IMO is a) untrue and b) irrelevant.
Some say they are more interested in authenticity than authority, and are not willing to pay for somebody's "big name" appeal. Others really like homemade culture; in fact, we are so inundated with electronic culture that getting together to make music with friends can be a subversive consumer act.
Then there are the ideological arguments. "Property is theft" was a popular slogan in the 1960s. I haven't heard it much lately. Oddly enough, the most vocal advocates of the idea that intellectual property is theft, are lawyers such as Michael Geist and Howard Knopf. Knopf has a blog, and Geist has weekly columns in major media, a blog, and a major platform on Facebook.
Remember that each nation has its own copyright code. Canada is under tremendous pressure right now to bring its copyright law into compliance with US law.
"Fair use" in the US permits a much wider range of copying than Canada currently permits, including incidental copying for educational purposes. The Canadian equivalent is "fair dealing", which was only a defence to charges of copyright infringement.
Then, a 2004 Supreme Court decision converted the enumerated (six) defences to infringement into what the Court dubbed "users' rights" -- a legal concept found nowhere else in the world.
Encouraged by the CCH decision, in 2004 the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada (CMEC) announced they would no longer pay to license works photocopied in primary education (K-12).
Access Copyright took them to the Copyright Board -- a quasi-judicial body created to arbitrate between creators' collectives and consumers -- which examined the evidence both sides presented and then ruled that, altogether, schools across Canada generate about 250 million unauthorized photocopies per year -- a quarter of a billion -- and had decreased their textbook purchases by about a million copies over four years, as a result.
Let's say that again: the vast number of photocopies correlated directly with a serious drop in textbook sales.
CMEC appealed the Copyright Board's decision to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Access won. CMEC appealed again. We go before the Supreme Court of Canada on December 7.
Meanwhile, the AUCC (Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) kept shrugging off Access' requests to meet in order to re-negotiate the rate for photocopying at post-secondary institutions. In March, Access finally filed an action against them too, at the Copyright Board, much to the universities' outrage. In examining why negotiations broke down, the Copyright Board found that "it takes two to tango, and the AUCC would not even come to the dance floor."
The universities were influenced by academics like Michael Geist (U of Ottawa) and library professor Sam Trosow (U of Western Ontario). Geist in particular has published years of columns full of the sort of statements that a lawyer might advance in arguing a lawsuit against accepting any costs or legalities using other people's work.
"I only hope it is increasingly clear to Canada's post-secondary education and library sectors," he wrote, "that they've been led down a highly theoretical garden path of free culture at the cost of a lot of goodwill and good faith agreement with their traditional partners -- Canada's creators and publishers -- not to mention the cost of a lot of time, effort and resources better spent, well, educating."
Geist has said in his blog that the doctrine of "fair dealing" includes reproducing up to 10 percent of a work, without permission or compensation.
Nothing in legislation or case law supports this claim, except perhaps squatter's rights. Yet, the Canadian Association of University Teacher's guide to copying urges individual professors to push the boundaries as far as they can. I guess they'll know they've gone too far when they get sued.
Of course, the biggest factor in this scenario is that last year, the Harper government introduced a new Copyright Act that suddenly and arbitrarily added "education" as an exception to copyright (at the personal direction of the Prime Minister, we're told). The Bill died on the Order Paper when the country went to election, but we expect the Harperites to re-introduce it in the fall.
Evidently the Americans are demanding that Canada bring its copyright act into complicance with theirs -- which some of us find ironic, considering the history.
Ah but, you may say, can a business built on photocopying adapt to the digital world of the future? Sharing documents online or through Intranets is becoming standard practice in education.
Well, Access Copyright offers a license for scanning and uploading to an intranet too. As a company whose business is based on databases, Access had a headstart with cyberspace, with projects such as:
-- pioneering universal Onix software so that RROs (Reprographic Rights Organizations) around the world can exchange information instantly, despite language and system differences.
-- through the RRO federation, supporting the International Standards Organization (ISO) in developing an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). This tiny bit of metadata is a virtual signature that a creator can attach to a work, and that will stay attached across online platforms.
-- hosting a Canadian publishers' directory and a creators' directory (two, in fact), and offering unlimited online memory to writers, publishers, and visual artists who are affiliates or members of Access Copyright's member groups.
Oh my, I've presented a lot of complicated information in a short space of time. Let's have five minutes of open-eyed meditation, to allow time for digestion. Here's "Blue Boat Home", a hymn from our teal hymnal, sung by its composer, Peter Mayer.
Unitarians covenant to practice equity, justice and compassion in human relations. For me, as an editor, justice includes being scrupulous about getting permissions and giving credit, and helping Straight Goods' writers any way I can.
You may see me handing out postcards to mail this fall. The upcoming season promises to be a lively time for people who care about copyright. The Harper government seems determined to re-introduce the proposed Copyright Act, despite objections about Technical Protection Measures provisions.
The real tension will come when the government tries to adjust its new Copyright Bill to the Berne Convention (incorporated into the TRIPS agreement).
The problem with allowing "education" as an exception, which is what Harperites propose, is that would surely trigger a legal challenge under Berne's three-step test, which states that reproduction without permission may be allowable in:
1) certain special cases
2) which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work, and
3. do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder.
Very few copyright experts (besides Geist and Knopf) believe that excepting "education" from copyright law would constitute "certain special cases".
For those who agree that respecting copyright is an ethical choice, I have some suggestions:
DON'T post entire works online without permission, either in email or on the Web or Facebook.
DO post two or three paragraphs of a work, with a link back to the original. (That's my definition of "fair dealing", by the way -- drawing attention to a work with a sample.)
DO credit the source and the creator (if possible), along with the link -- for images as well as for text.
DON'T reprint newspaper, magazine or online articles in newsletters, without getting the authors' permission.
DO start from the premise that whoever's name is on the work, owns the work. Their permission counts more than anyone else's.
You might have noticed that I have juxtaposed nature and culture in this presentation. That's because I seem them as parallel ecosystems, both living expressions of our collective world view. We've recognized that plundering the earth is short-sighted. Can we recognize that culture needs to be sustained too?
Oh, I know, there are gray areas in knowing when copyright applies. Maybe we can agree that making a mix tape for a friend is okay, but that retailing that tape is not. Does that work? Without copyright, there will be no livelihood in working in culture.
At the very least, we should acknowledge, as Victorian essayist, reformer and art critic John Ruskin said, "A book worth reading is worth buying." (Thanks, Sheila;) )
Before we gather here again--
may each of us bring happiness into another's life;
may we each be surprised by the gifts that surround us;
may each of us be enlivened by constant curiosity --
And may we remain together in spirit
til the hour we meet again.
Please join me in singing Spirit of Life, Hymn #123.
Like buildings, governments are easy to demolish but slow and difficult to build. The Obama administration has been carefully reconstructing departments and agencies that the Bush adminstration took the axe to, repeatedly, over eight years. The Department of Labour is a case in point.
First, let’s consider how much damage a hostile administration can inflict on the civil service. In his book, The Wrecking Crew, historian Thomas Frank described (as the subtitle said) "How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation”.
Discussing this theme on the Bill Moyers Journal recently, Frank said, “What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they're in power deliver government failure....there's a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate...”
Workers have taken the brunt of conservative efforts to undermine government. Not only does the US federal government outsource as much as 90 percent of its work – thus weakening the public service unions that negotiate higher wages and benefits – but all the evidence shows that the Bush government very deliberately stripped away personnel, resources and regulatory authority from the Department of Labor and OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
As Rep. George Miller wrote in an article for the Huffington Post in September 2008, “From day one, Bush's Department of Labor has actively worked to undermine workers' rights to organize, to fair pay and decent benefits, and to safe working conditions -- rights that are essential to growing and sustaining a strong middle class. US Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and other high-level appointees came to their posts determined to weaken the agency.
“Under Chao's leadership, the department has repeatedly torpedoed rules designed to help workers. One of her first actions was supporting the repeal of a rule that would have protected workers against repetitive motion injuries, the leading cause of workplace injuries.
“Chao went on to severely weaken the department's Wage and Hour Division -- which enforces overtime, minimum wage, and child labor laws. Wage theft has skyrocketed at the hands of this administration: An ongoing US Government Accountability Office investigation has uncovered repeated cases where the agency refused to go after scofflaw employers who admittedly owed their workers back wages....”
Last March, the GAO (Government Accountability Office, the equivalent of the Auditor-General) reported that the Department of Labor mishandled nine out of ten complaints brought by investigators posing as aggrieved workers. Most complaints involved wage theft – employers refusing to pay overtime or even basic wages due – but the DOL didn’t even respond when GAO investigators called in a complaint about school-aged children working in a meatpacking plant during school hours, which on the face of it involves violation of several federal laws.
Wage theft was less awful than the health and safety violations that went unchecked. In February 2009, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka wrote: “In 2007 alone, 5,488 [US] workers were killed on the job and an estimated 50,000 more lost their lives to occupational diseases — almost as many deaths in just one year as the entire number of Americans who lost their lives over 16 years in the Vietnam war. In that same single year of 2007, there were more than 4 million job-related injuries and illnesses...”
What a difference a year makes! As Ronald Reagan once said, “Personnel is policy.” Labour advocates sensed that the situation was turning around when Hilda Solis was sworn in as Secretary of Labor. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” she announced. “OSHA is back in the business of enforcement.” The DOL set about hiring 250 new enforcement officers.
Health and safety advocates practically did cartwheels at the news that the Obama administration would appoint Jordan Barab as the acting head of OSHA. (Rumour said that Obama might have appointed Peggy Seminario, who was head of the AFL-CIO’s OSH section, except that she was registered as a lobbyist.)
Here’s the official bumpf: “Jordan Barab joined OSHA as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health on April 13, 2009.... He previously served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA from 1998 to 2001, when he helped the Agency to promulgate the ergonomics workplace safety and health standard that was repealed by Congress in March 2001.... he was a Health and Safety Specialist for the AFL-CIO from 2001 to 2002; and he directed the safety and health program for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees from 1982 to 1998. He also created and wrote the award-winning weblog, Confined Space, from 2003 to 2007.”
In short, Barab is a highly knowledgeable advocate who has been a gadfly for most of the last administration. Likewise with Deborah Berkowitz ,who was named chief of staff at OSHA. Berkowitz is the former health and safety director at the United Food and Commercial Workers’ union, and a veritable champion of ergonomics regulations.
Lawyer James A. Lastowka summarized the changes for the readers of Ready Plant magazine: “The top priority of the New OSHA can be summarized in two words: strong enforcement.” He warned readers to clean up their operations.
The anti-union lobbyists who call themselves “Right-To-Work” advocates are beside themselves, and their rage mounts with every new Obama administration appointment. Their fury is kind of comforting to labour activists. Here is the introduction to their most recent video, The Obama White House -- Where Everybody Knows the Union Bosses' Names:
“Although surprisingly NOT registered as a lobbyist, SEIU Top Boss Andy Stern is The White House's most frequent visitor. Union bosses get top billing at high-profile administration events. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis's last job was at Big Labor-front group American Rights at Work. To commemorate the union bosses' newfound friendliness with top White House politicos, we decided to put together a short video on the Obama Administration relationship with Big Labor.”
Appointments are well and good, some readers are muttering, but have all these new people actually achieved anything? Well, take a look at some of the 14 Department of Labour news releases for December 2009:
* OSHA cites Walt Disney World following monorail collision and issues recommendation letter following actor’s death; * Employment and Training Administration [ETA] announces $3.8 million grant to assist workers in Massachusetts affected by financial industry layoffs; * Wages and Hours Department [WHD] recovers nearly $1 million in back wages for 206 Seattle security company workers; * WHD recovers more than $1.7 million in fringe benefits for 483 employees of VMT Long Term Care Management Inc; * Members of Interagency Council on Veterans Employment agree to publish plan to increase hiring of veterans by federal agencies; * DOL announces grant exceeding $461,000 to assist workers in Oregon affected by lumber industry layoffs; * WHD News Release: US Labor Department recovers more than $1.7 million in back wages for about 4,000 health care workers of SSM Health Care in St. Louis, Mo; * ETA announces more than $800,000 to assist workers in Oregon affected by lumber industry layoffs; and * Mine Safety and Health launches comprehensive action plan to tackle black lung.
After President Obama’s first State of the Union address – so soon after the disastrous Massachusetts by-election – many observers said it was good speech but that actions speak louder than words. Obama has not been able to achieve some of his goals, in his first year, and some think he has paid too high a price for the goals he has almost reached, such as health care. However, if the Department of Labor is an example, this administration has had to rebuild from the bottom up. The results might not be obvious for a while.
