Roger-Luc Chayer
On January 11, while gently listening to an episode of the Columbo series on the Prize 2 channel, I saw a phantom shadow pass by on the film set and at the time, the producer had certainly decided to let it pass or simply hadn’t. not seen, HD TV did not exist then.
Finding the situation funny, I backtrack, take my cell phone, take a video capture of about 30 seconds and post the video on Facebook with the following comment: “Do you see what is happening? Like a kind of quiz.
On January 13, two days later, I received a notice from Facebook telling me that my account was blocked in the following terms: « We have removed the following content that you posted on Facebook, or we no longer allow it. access to it, following a request from a third party that the content infringes its copyright. Therefore, you can no longer use the post feature on Facebook for now. This block is temporary and will expire in 3 days. Rights holder: NBCUniversal. »
To my amazement, the owner of the rights to the Columbo series, shot over 30 years ago, NBC-Universal, sued Facebook for copyright infringement on a 30-second excerpt that does not come from not even an original but filmed off-key with my cell phone. But lo and behold, Canadian copyright law allowed me to release this excerpt under “fair use”. When I wanted to contest this blocking with Facebook, the complaint response form page was not accessible to me, since I was blocked!!!
According to Section 29 of the Canadian Copyright Act: « The fair use of a work or other copyrighted material for the purposes of private study, research, education, parody or satire does not constitute copyright infringement. »
In my case, indeed, the 30-second extract was to make fun of a filming defect, so my message was satirical. According to the Larousse dictionary, satire is “writing or drawing that turns someone or something into ridicule. I didn’t dispute NBC’s or Facebook’s ridiculous decisions any further, but I did write an email to NBC, at the address given by Facebook, to explain the context and ask them to proceed with the unblocking. while emphasizing that this case had the effect of depriving thousands of readers of new messages from the Gay Globe Group, which is a media aimed at LGBT communities. Nothing to do, I did not get any response whatsoever.
During these three days, therefore, I was unable to communicate on Messenger with anyone or to publish or interact on both my personal page and that of Gay Globe. This situation was a flagrant violation of the free flow of news, a fundamental right guaranteed by the Canadian Constitution. We therefore, de facto, censored a media, and for that, I proceeded to close the Gay Globe media account at Facebook permanently. There is a price to pay for doing this Facebook!!!