Translating the printemps érable

Johanne Lapierre    June 27, 2012 

Original French Text: http://blogues.radio-canada.ca/surleweb/2012/06/27/publicite-plq-marois-retire/

The story has been widely circulated in the media and on the web: the Liberal party of Quebec (PLQ) used images taken from an amateur video in which Pauline Marois is seen participating in a casserole protest to make an advertisement, which is currently broadcast on television. After the first broadcast of this advertisement on the web, the author of the images, Guy Séguin, sent a legal demand to the PLQ, arguing that they were using his images without his authorization.

But still the Liberal party refuses to remove its advertisement from its site, it having nevertheless disappeared from several websites, including Facbeook, Youtube and Vimeo. All this because of the intervention of a firm called Police du Net.

Police du Net specializes in removing works from the web, be it from sites that share videos like YouTube, or from sites that illegally share folders (torrent sites). Several Quebec businesses representing artists pay this firm to ensure that their content is not found illegally on the web.

Made aware of Mr. Séguin’s story, Police du net studied the situation. After having judged that in this case there was a violation of Mr. Séguin’s rights of the author, the firm offered him its services.

Having an agreement with Google given the elevated number of removal requests, Police du net was able to have the video removed from YouTube Tuesday. According to its CEO, Dominic Morrissette, when a video of this kind is removed from YouTube, those who put it on line can always make a counter-request to ask the site to reevaluate their decision. The video was still unavailable on YouTube Wednesday.

Police du Net also submitted the issue to Facebook, with the coal of having the advertisement removed from the Liberal party’s page on the social network. Mr. Morrissette confirms that they submitted the original video to Facebook, then the version that was made by the PLQ in the advertisement. The social network acquiesced to Mr. Morrissette’s request and the video was removed from the page. Finally, Wednesday, the video was also removed from the video-sharing site Vimeo.

The advertisement is currently available on the Liberal party’s web site through a video console having to connection to an external video-sharing site. Police du net has asked the host of the site to have it removed. It remains to be seen what will come from this request.

A saga probably at an end

The author of the Video, Guy Séguin, mentions on his side “the excellent work” of Police du net. He says he is evaluating the situation to see if he will decide to take legal action against the PLQ, without hiding that the probability is low: “I believe that the message has passed. People will pay attention”.

Or not. Between the cinematographer, the Liberal party of Quebec and the Parti québécois, everyone is passing the buck. In a letter sent to Mr. Séguin yesterday, the general director of the party, Karl Blackburn, maintains that the images used in the advertisement were taken from the Facebook page of a Parti québécois candidate in Argenteuil, “with the explicit or implicit consent of whoever filmed them”. From its side, the PQ denies it, declaring to have “never broadcast this video on its sites”.

The cinematographer also denies having broadcast another video on Facebook, parodying a liberal advertisement: “I don’t broadcast much, I share”.  In his letter, Karl Blackburn referred to this video, adding: “It seems evident to us that you understand very well the political context in which our respective approaches have been made heard.”

From a legal point of view, the question of author’s rights is rarely settled before the tribunals, underlines Me Marcel Lacoursière in an interview with the show 24 heures en 60 minutes. “The problem with authors rights, and this is a widespread problem, is that the rights have a very low economic value that doesn’t cover the legal fees to have the law applied” maintains the lawyer.

With Florent Daudens

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Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable.

*Translating the printemps érable is a volunteer collective attempting to balance the English media’s extremely poor coverage of the student conflict in Québec by translating media that has been published in French into English. These are amateur translations; we have done our best to translate these pieces fairly and coherently, but the final texts may still leave something to be desired. If you find any important errors in any of these texts, we would be very grateful if you would share them with us at translatingtheprintempsderable@gmail.com. Please read and distribute these texts in the spirit in which they were intended; that of solidarity and the sharing of information.