Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Where's the CanCon?

I recently noticed that a CBC story about the impending arrival of Tropical Storm Maria in Atlantic Canada was supported with two different graphics from the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, even though they talked to someone from the Canadian Hurricane Center about the storm for the story. And I should make it clear that it is not the case that the Canadian Hurricane Center doesn't have visualizations of the storm projections. They do and they are available to the public through their website.

At first I couldn't quite figure out why the American images were used. And while I still don't have a conclusive answer I wonder if it may have something to do with copyright and that the images produced by the US government are easier to use than those produced by the Canadian government?

This seems like a plausible justification for the occurrence as materials produced by the US government are not copyrighted in the traditional sense. They can be, and frequently are, reproduced by others at no charge and without the need to clear such reproductions. Canadian government content, on the other hand, is not so easily reproducible. The Canadian government retains copyright and more actively controls the reproduction of the content that it produces.

So might this more restrictive approach to government information have lead to the CBC, a public entity funded by the same government that funds the Canadian Hurricane Center, to favour foreign content over domestic content?

How ironic that this might be the case in a country such as Canada that places such emphasis on the creation of domestic media content.

3 comments:

Kathy said...

A few years ago the US government had to admit that what the tax payer had paid for, belonged to the taxpayer. Maybe Canada should do the same.

Anonymous said...

Good point. But that might also suggest that we should know the amount of dividends we received (or maybe didn't receive) from our new GM ownership. Of course, if the answer is "none", we should know that, too.

Cameron said...

Anonymous, I am not really sure how these two issues are related. It seems like a bit of a stretch, even if they both are things that are worth thinking about.