OTTAWA – A news report which included a video clip taken from YouTube should have identified its creator, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) has ruled.
The CBSC investigated a story broadcast on APTN’s National News on November 17, 2009 about the unauthorized removal of an international stone boundary marker in Akwesasne, an area bordering Ontario, Quebec, and New York state. The report included a YouTube video clip of a group of people removing the stone marker.
The news segment in question consisted of the news anchor interviewing the APTN reporter who was following this story. The boundary marker had been removed, but no one was admitting to being involved in its removal and the authorities seemed reluctant to pursue the matter. The reporter explained that a clip of the unauthorized removal had been put up on the video-sharing website YouTube; APTN broadcast a portion of that clip as a part of his report.
The complaint came from the person who had filmed the clip. She stated that the reporter had contacted her regarding use of the clip and that she had told him that he was not allowed to use it in a broadcast. APTN responded that it had not taken credit for the clip because it had clearly indicated that the clip was from YouTube, which it argued is “a public domain and available to anyone.”
The CBSC’s National Specialty Services panel examined the complaint under Article 11 (Intellectual Property) of the RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics, which states that “broadcast journalists will strive to honour the intellectual property of others”. The panel said that it could not make any determination with respect to what was said during off-air telephone conversations between the reporter and the complainant (which had also been a part of the original complaint). It did, however, find APTN in breach of Article 11 for its failure to identify the clip’s creator.
“As APTN’s Director of Creative Services & Scheduling said in her response of December 11 to the complainant: "At no time did APTN take credit for this footage or even allude to having shot this particular story”, reads the panel’s decision. “While that was undeniably a step in the right direction, in the view of the panel, the credit given was insufficient. As this panel said in [a previous] decision, “the definition of what is fair, what, in terms of the RTNDA Code, will ‘honour the intellectual property of others’, must, at the very least, and consistent with Section 29.2 of the Copyright Act, mention the source, including the name of the author, of the photographic work […] particularly where, as in the present matter, the identity of the photographer was known.” In the matter at hand, the panel is of the view that the broadcaster had the legitimate option of using the complainant’s real name, which was known to […] the reporter, or the handle that she used on the YouTube video. APTN did not, however, have the option of using neither. Consequently, the panel finds APTN in breach of Article 11 of the RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics for its failure to identify the creator of the video, when that information was available to it.”
