Open Media nailed it! Awesome commentary on the Vancouver Aquarium's lawsuit against Vancouver-Aquarium-Uncovered documentary director Gary Charbonneau. Here's an excerpt of the article: A case study To illustrate why we need this new framework, let’s take a closer look at a different case that is currently winding its way through the appeal process in British Columbia. In the case of Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre v. Charbonneau, Vancouver-based filmmaker Gary Charbonneau was sued by the Vancouver Aquarium over a documentary he produced about whale and dolphin breeding and captivity at the centre. The Vancouver Aquarium alleges that Charbonneau infringed its copyright in the making of his documentary, and sought an injunction to have the video removed from YouTube and Vimeo, where Charbonneau had uploaded it. According to Charbonneau, the Aquarium contacted both Vimeo and YouTube with a request to remove the film. Although YouTube refused, Vimeo did remove it from their site until the filmmaker defended himself, at which point Vimeo demanded the Aquarium provide proof that they were moving forward with legal action if they wanted the film to stay down. In fact, as Charbonneau told me when I spoke with him, it seemed as though the lawsuit was exclusively filed to have the film removed from the site. “I didn’t find out about it until CBC broke the news. So we’re under the strong impression that the Aquarium was never sueing me, they were just using the court system to keep [the documentary] off of Vimeo.” As documentary filmmakers know all too well, documentary work often relies on using content that is already out there in the world, hoping that our copyright laws protect this use under fair dealing. As they also know, oftentimes the real test of whether their documentary will face legal action depends on what content has been used, and how much money the copyright holder has to take the filmmaker to court. Importantly, documentary work allows us to be critical of the world around us, and to ask questions and invite discussion on social and political issues of interest. In Charbonneau’s case, the questions he raises about whale breeding and captivity are those issues. Charbonneau believes that his film was targeted because of what he said, not the images he used to tell the story. If the Vancouver Aquarium believed that the documentary portrayed them in an unfair light, they have plenty of legal recourse through libel and defamation laws. But they chose not to go this route, and instead pushed to have the documentary scrubbed from the web by using (or abusing) copyright law. And unfortunately in Charbonneau’s case, the Aquarium was somewhat successful in its aims, and was awarded an injunction that required the filmmaker to edit his documentary and remove the allegedly infringing content – about five minutes of footage. Frustratingly for Charbonneau, this wasn’t enough for the Aquarium, as even after he had removed all of the content that was originally objected to in the lawsuit, the Aquarium went on to add material to the “copyright offending” list. The impacts of the ruling are not lost on Charbonneau: “Essentially no artist across Canada has protection anymore, according to this judge, because the policy of a corporation will trump the law. That’s frightening, to be quite honest.” Charbonneau has been granted leave to appeal the decision by the BC Court of Appeal, and his lawyer will be making the argument that this is a case in which copyright has been misused to censor free expression. And we tend to agree – copyright is not the tool we’d like to see used when there is debate and discussion over political speech, but it sadly has a long track record of holding that dubious space, both in Canada’s legal system and others. “We didn’t have to appeal," said Charbonneau. "And if we win, what do we get? We just put the five minutes back up. The reason why we appealed it is exactly what we just talked about: it went beyond us proving that we have the right to have those five minutes up. It was the precedent. We did this for all artists across Canada.” Click below to read complete article.