Every so often, students walking through the McMaster University Student Centre are met with faces of The Beatles, large maps of the world and even prints of Banksy’s most popular works.
The Imaginus poster sale, which has been touring Canadian university and college campuses since 1975, is a staple of the university experience. It is not uncommon to see their posters plastered over the walls of dorms and off-campus housing.
The Imaginus poster sale is happening right now in MUSC!
Make sure to check it out before they leave tomorrow 🙂#McSU pic.twitter.com/FfDqEesAgc
— MSU Campus Events (@msucampusevents) January 31, 2019
At first glance, the poster sales seem innocent enough. For under $10, you can get away with two good-sized posters of your favourite band or quote — what could be wrong with that?
A lot, actually. The Imaginus poster sale has been critiqued in the past for selling posters that promote cultural appropriation, and poster sales in general have been scrutinized for the ethics of selling reproduced and borderline copyright-infringement artwork. This can especially raise eyebrows as it is rare that the collected profits ever reach the original artists.
But beyond the possible problematic nature of the content of their posters, the Imaginus poster sales take away opportunities from student artists. As it stands, McMaster University students cannot sell their artwork on campus for a profit.
According to the Policy on Student Groups, student groups on campus “may not engage in activities that are essentially commercial in nature.”
This policy is what caused the shutdown of an art sale by McMaster’s Starving Artists Society last year. The club is made up of student artists and creatives that are looking to expand their portfolio and reach a wider audience.
The event that was shut down was meant to be an opportunity for student artists to market their artwork to their peers and even profit off of their hard work. Many of Mac’s student artist community are involved with SAS and were negatively affected by the university’s decision to shut the event down.
Essentially, the university has allowed Imaginus to have an unfair monopoly on selling art on campus. For a university that already arguably disvalues the arts, to dissuade student artists from profiting from their work is a serious matter.
This brings to light a larger issue at hand. Why should any students be disallowed to sell their products on campus — especially when outside companies are given space in our student centre to sell their products?
This situation unfortunately reflects the situation of many non-student local artists within the community. In our corporate world, it is extremely difficult to establish a reliable clientele and profit off of one’s work. Mass commercialized products inherently cost less and as a result, this drives away sales from local artists.
As the university makes a profit from the poster sales, and in general from any vendors on campus, it is unlikely that this issue will be addressed anytime soon.
Until it is, you can support local and student artists through sharing their work, reaching out to them and contributing towards their sales. The SAS also runs art crawls and other events where students can get in contact with student artists!
Everyone has a Friends poster in their house. When you buy local and student, not only are you supporting your peers, but you’re likely acquiring higher quality and truly unique works of art.
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On Aug. 6, 2014, Twitch, a website used to stream user-generated videogame content, announced that they would be adopting a Content ID system to their videos, muting any archived videos that had copyright content. This is a very big deal. This change once against reflects a dated system of copyright that cannot keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape of the internet, and a growing imbalance of power amongst large corporations and independent content creators.
So what is Content ID? To those who aren’t familiar, it’s a system that automatically scans videos for audio content that is believed to infringe upon copyrighted material, and automatically removes it. This system was added December 2013 to YouTube, and has since migrated to Twitch as well.
While this may seem like an effective way to reduce the risk of legal action against Twitch or its users, this change marks a growing trend in the way online media is legally regulated, and has some serious drawbacks in terms of censorship and monopolization. This is because Content ID simply doesn’t work.
Because the system is automatic, there is often little way to tell if the creator actually owns the content, as the system just scans a database of existing audio files, and removes or mutes the videos as needed. This means that thousands of Twitch streamers and YouTubers have had their content removed automatically without warning, often with little way to fight it, even if they have acquired the appropriate rights.
As a result, companies like Valve have had their videos muted on Twitch, because they possessed copyrighted music inside the Dota 2 video game, despite them being the creators of the very game that was removed. The number of legal redundancies this system creates is seemingly endless, and unfortunately not everyone has the power to stop it.
Now some of you might be thinking: “What’s the harm? Can’t one simply stop using copyrighted material and avoid this problem altogether?” Well, that is where things get complicated. The problem is that copyright law in Canada and the United States simply hasn’t evolved quickly enough to deal with the growing amount of user-generated content.
For those unfamiliar, copyright systems in the United States and Canada both work under an exception that allows the use of copyrighted material if it is for research, educational purposes, criticism, review or news reporting, to name a few. In Canada this system is known as fair dealing, and in the United States this system is known as fair use. While the systems differ, both work on a case-by-case basis, and because of this many cases are decided by a judge.
If you aren’t seeing the problem, I’ll make it simple. There are not enough judges in the world to handle the amount of new material that YouTube and Twitch users produce. This means that most people burned by the automatic system of Content ID have no way to combat unfair regulation, leaving many smaller known users simply out of luck.
It seems as time passes the Internet is beginning to lose the freedoms and opportunities it once offered, slowly returning power to big businesses. It is time for North America and the world to address a growing issue stifling the freedoms of independent content creators. It is time to bring copyright law into an age of new media.
