Telus Cleanses Image on YouTube
Take-down of pro-union films angers Internet speech advocates.
Telus building in Vancouver
Have Telus managers been brushing up on Orwell?
The company's mantra insists "the future is friendly," but critics say Telus is stifling the Internet to sweep the less-than-friendly bits of their past out of sight.
Earlier this month, Telus ordered YouTube to take down at least 23 videos posted to the site. Each short movie was potentially embarrassing to the telecom's public image since they documented instances of the company's rocky labour relations. Telus claimed their presence on YouTube, a user-generated website, was an act of copyright infringement.
YouTube's owners complied and took the videos off-line, but that set off alarm bells among union activists, who argue much of the footage never belonged to Telus in the first place.
The move also raised hackles with Internet free speech advocates because it appears to be part of a pattern that sees the telecom giant manipulating the web for anti-union purposes. They point to what happened in 2005, when Telus made international headlines by blocking 766 websites in order to bar access to a single pro-union one.
Telus Idol
The videos were filmed at different times and locales, but labour activist Dennis Watson says they had a common theme: to highlight the sour relations between Telus managers and their employees, many of whom are represented by the Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU).
Watson posted the videos on behalf of friends in the TWU, and though the links to the videos from his website are now broken, he described some of them in an interview with The Tyee. (A brief synopsis of each one is also available on his website.)
A particularly damaging set of videos, eight in all, were of a lewd "team-building" party, caught on tape. As reported in a previous Tyee story, those videos showed company employees taking turns singing pop songs with Telus-related lyrics, while male Telus managers loudly rated the performances -- in highly sexualized terms when women took the stage.
Another has Telus CEO Darren Entwistle making a joke about the sexual orientation of the multi-millionaire CEO of Cisco, caught on film during a training seminar.
'Happy scabby'
While he suspects the eight Idol spoofs and the video with the Cisco comment likely belong to Telus, Watson says there are 14 others that do not.
Three of those are pro-union songs set to images of TWU picket lines, several are news reports, and the rest were composed of footage captured by members on their cell phones of scuffles between union employees and AFI security guards contracted by Telus. These videos stem from the bitter battle between the company and employees over outsourcing jobs to Asia.
Two songs, said Watson, "The Darren Scare'em Union Bustin' Blues" and "Happy Scabby," were original works written and performed by friends on the TWU picket line. They asked not to have their names revealed out of fear for their jobs.
Some of the material, however, is still available on the TWU website, or through file-sharing websites like BitTorrent.
The YouTube truth
Watson has filed a counterclaim to YouTube, asking the company to reinstate all of the videos, including the ones he suspects may legally belong to Telus.
"For them to be able to take that off the Internet on a copyright claim when they don't have the copyright, that's criminal," he said.
Watson said that the videos serve as important information for the public to have a full picture of the company's corporate behaviour.
"We're just basically showing people what Telus is doing with their offshore call centres. We're showing them that a lot of Telus employees do support union activity," a message Watson believes Telus is trying to squelch by having the videos taken down.
Asked if his company had overstepped, company spokesperson Jim Johannsson had the following to say: "There were videos internal to Telus that were posted on the site without Telus's permission."
TWU president George Doubt declined to comment, noting that ongoing grievances prevented him from doing so. Several TWU members involved in making the videos and contacted by The Tyee also declined to go on the record. They too cited unresolved grievances.
Web on ice
Internet law expert Michael Geist wrote about the take-down on his blog. He also spoke with The Tyee.
"To the extent to which this is material that they have no copyright over, it's absolutely unconscionable and an abuse of the system," said Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a wave of individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users, according to a U.S. group called Chilling Effects.
The current notice-and-take-down system used in the U.S. to regulate copyright in user-generated communities like YouTube and ISPs like Telus is a ready-made tool to do just that, said Geist.
"Part of the problem is that so much of it occurs under the radar screen. There's a sense that there are literally thousands of take-down notices issued on a weekly basis."
Ironically, says Geist, Telus has historically lobbied against implementing the same system in Canada because the "shoot first and aim later" approach creates a lot of work for them as an Internet service provider.
To counter the abuse, Chilling Effects invites Internet companies to post the notices, which have become a major online annoyance.
"In a sense, Telus is making a good case for why notice-and-take-down is not a good approach."
Canada, he added, is considering a more equitable approach called "notice-and-notice," which in effect would require a court order before material could be taken down, thus taking away the incentive for intermediaries to take down music, video and other content without proof of copyright infringement.
Onerous onus?
Under U.S. policy, however, it still falls to the person who posted the disputed content to prove ownership, which takes time, and sometimes money. Geist says most people choose to move on rather than fight.
However, he also said that if it could be proven that Telus claimed ownership of something they don't legally own, they could be open to litigation, although the liability would be modest.
One month later, Watson is still waiting to hear the results of his counterclaim, but he's dead-set on seeing the movies back on the web.
"Keeping them on YouTube shows the truth."
Related Tyee stories:
- To Censor Pro-Union Web Site, Telus Blocked 766 Others
Company's labour dispute tactic may affect internet speech law. - The Video that Outrages Telus Employees
Lewd 'team building' party, caught on tape, further soured relations inside phone firm. - Telus CEO Was on Stage in Raunchy 'Telus Idol' Video
Management ordered workers to watch tape many found offensive.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Fiat lux
02-07-2007
The control of information
The control of information has always been one of the greatest powers in the hands of religions and ruling classes. E.g. Their present ownership, control and censorship of the media to mislead people into false sense of well being. And it works.
Since the invention of printing, the internet is the first and strongest weapon in the hands of ordinary people for the instant exchange of information, even when it is used by relatively small percentage.
It is obvious then that there have already been, are and will be increasing efforts to remove this power from the hands of the unwashed public and put it under the control of the multinational, wealth creating conspirators.
In the name of "intellectual property rights" and "freedom" of course, while they're mobilizing to destroy democracy and replace it with a global, corporate dictatorship, called "free trade".
Of course, "conspiracy theories" are supposed to be very funny, but what about bona fide conspiracies, like the Bilderbergers, Trilaterals, World Economic Forum, etc. etc.
If these secret get togethers are not conspiracies for world control, what are they?
Ed Deak.
gaulois
02-07-2007
Net neutrality and political parties
Although I don't agree about posting certain material that appears clearly slandering (the Christmas party stuff), this case of Telus infringing on Net neutrality deserves the attention of political parties. I understand the CRTC was supposed to rule on Net neutrality but this is too important to leave it to them under the influence of special well funded interest groups.
How come no political party has put Net neutrality on its platform yet? Must we wait more nasty effects similar to global warming before anyone acts? Should we be surprised that no political party has produced a media policy in their platform?
Reader11722
02-07-2007
Free Speech is over.
Canada is following the US example to crush free speech. In the US, this is all about the First Amendment. Let's not follow the gov't down the path of censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like "America Deceived" from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for the internet).
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Decevied (book)
dorothy
02-07-2007
Are you hearing me over there?
This is really a difficult set of issues. The great freedom of the internet and its potential is always in jeopardy from the few, who cannot resist hanging somebody out to dry, who is a real jerk, who is behaving below the navel, who is not all his or her high posotiton would seem to entail.
The question is, is it to the point? I have on occasion been involved in dealing with labor contract issues and have had the greatest success with that in never getting personal, but holding people’s feet to the fire on the actual issues of the contract. It is not who they are, it is what they do. Managerial people, those who are willing, nay, eager, to do that job are, for the most part, insecure, scared little people on the inside. Many have sought managerial or supervisory positions, because they could not hack it in honest comparison to colleagues on the factory floor. Let us kick them up into positions where they will do less damage. In fact, the good choice would have been to dump many of them. Supervisors and managers should be elected by the ranks from which they are drawn, then we would get the good ones.
My point is, the managers who let loose and made asses of themselves on said videos simply behaved in the character you could expect. What of it? The internet is not for hanging little people out to dry, but for getting the important points across. The important point was the outsourcing. Was it in accord with the contract? If no, grieve it, if yes, regroup and rethink the strategy. Where were the cool heads in that union executive? I know unions, where the executive could count on the rank and file sticking together so you couldn’t get a piece of paper between any two individuals, not to mention they would follow, and only follow, in a crisis, directives from the executive. This does not make them into sheep, it makes them into a disciplined, effective force, able to fight for their rights and make it stick.
Telus was way out of line in doing what they did, but don’t hand it so easily to the idiots!
rotlin
02-07-2007
Chilling Effects for Canada
The Chilling Efects Clearinghouse website that is linked to in this article looks like a thorough web site on the "chilling effects" of legal threats on lawful conduct in the U.S.A.
What similiar sites/organizations exist for the same issues in Canada? Michael Geist could use some company. When will Canadian political parties start to take explicit stands on internet governance issues?
telus employee
02-07-2007
More censorship than the Internet
There is more to the censorship story than this issue with the internet. My wife works in the media and in 2004 we were at a wedding table with a reporter from Global who was involved in doing a series of stories on the bad service Telus was providing and the amount of complaints to the CRTC for failure to meet its regulated wireline commitments. I asked the reporter if she was planning on doing any more stories on Telus and she said "No way. We aren't allowed to touch that."
Her story was that the CEO of Telus had complained bitterly about the stories to Global, not on the basis of their truth but on the bad press they were giving Telus. According to her representatives from Telus had pointed out to CanWest/Global that Telus has a $400 million advertising budget annually of which a good portion goes to CanWest. If they wanted to be part of Telus' advertising they had better stop the stories.
If I have my dates correct, the stories stopped (after daily coverage) in November 2003 after a softball interview with CEO Darren Entwistle. My conversation took place in January 2004 and even though the service was still as bad there were virtually no critical stories on CanWest/Global.
mjscox
02-07-2007
one way to make yourself heard
If there's one thing Telus does not want, more than bad publicity, more than having this story on The Tyee, it is to lose customers. Especially now that cell phone numbers are easily transferable to another carrier. If you don't like what Telus is doing to free speech, feel free to switch. If you are a Telus internet subscriber, consider the alternative services. They can take down some innocuous videos which wouldn't have received anywhere near the coverage they've received thanks to their ham-fisted actions with YouTube, but they can't stop us from cancelling our accounts with them.
skeptikool
03-07-2007
It's ours to lose.
This medium is very much under attack. Let us not lose it by default.
Excessive timidity and fear if litigation, I suspect, causes certain ISPs and messageboard moderators to cave in to the muzzling of material when they don't have a legal need to do so.