Climate Change or Climate Change?: Guarding Copyrights on a Warming Planet

By Nalaka Gunawardene

COLOMBO, Nov 7 — On a recent visit to Tokyo, I watched Climate in Crisis, an excellent documentary co-produced in 2006 by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK  along with The Science Channel and ALTOMEDIA/France 5.

The film draws heavily on the Earth Simulator — one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers — which scientists use to project our planet's climate. It can anticipate climatic patterns in the atmosphere and the oceans over the next 100 years.

The results, captured in this documentary, are both mind-boggling and alarming. In the coming decades, atmospheric temperatures may rise by as much as 4.2 degrees Celsius. This can spur more frequent and intense hurricanes. Deserts may spread from Africa to southern Europe, and half of the Amazon rainforest could disappear. Based on rigorous scientific data, Climate in Crisis presents scenarios for massive environmental destruction, and discusses whether and how humankind can avoid this fate.

I was curious why this hugely important film hasn’t been more widely seen, talked about and distributed in Asia. It had been released in the same year as Al Gore’s acclaimed documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The reason soon became apparent: copyright restrictions! Its producers are controlling the rights so tightly that only the highest bidders are allowed to acquire it on hefty license fees.

JEALOUSLY GUARDED

While it is standard broadcast industry practice, I was taken aback by how jealously the rights are being guarded. This  was quite evident in an Asian workshop on climate change and moving images, which involved public screening of several outstanding climate documentaries to the Tokyo public. While all other films, including some high-budget commercial productions, were cleared for such screening, Climate Crisis was not.

The overseas participants watched it inside NHK headquarters. As we later heard, NHK itself was agreeable to a public screening — after all, every Japanese household pays a fee to support their public broadcaster. But the film's international co-producing partners simply didn't allow it.

Twenty centuries ago, Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today, some media companies are squabbling over copyrights while the planet is warming.

What I experienced in Tokyo is not an isolated incident. Whatever the crisis and however important the cause, a majority of media companies and filmmakers maintain their tight control over rights. They won't relax it even for the majority world where 'returns on investment' are often not feasible. Their policy: no fee, no see.

I come across this attitude all the time. My organisation, TVE Asia Pacific, peddles hundreds of development films in the world's largest region. Our non-profit service clears rights for top TV and video films and then distributes them to broadcast, civil society and educational users in over two dozen developing countries. We operate outside the crushing license fee arrangements — copyright owners participate on a pure goodwill basis, allowing their creations to be used far and wide for awareness, advocacy, education and training purposes. End users pay only for copying and dispatch costs.

Such secondary distribution may not change producers' balance sheets, but it gives a whole new life to their films. Unshackled from rights restrictions, good films can have numerous uses for years.

We regularly hear stories about such use. Speaking at the Tokyo workshop, Pham Thuy Trang, a reporter with Vietnam Television (VTV), revealed how a TV series we supplied last year marked a turning point in Vietnam’s public discussion and understanding of climate change.

In mid 2007, VTV was one among many Asian TV stations who received Climate Challenge, a six-part international series co-produced by One Planet Pictures (UK) and dev.tv (Switzerland). Having versioned it into Vietnamese at their own cost, VTV broadcast the series in December 2007 to coincide with the 13th UN climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia.

TURNING POINT IN VIETNAM

“That was the first time the issue received such in-depth TV coverage in Vietnam,” Trang said. This was particularly significant because a 2007 survey revealed low levels of interest in climate issues in the Vietnamese media. That is in spite of the World Bank identifying Vietnam, with its 3,000-km long coastline, being among the countries most vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Alas, the co-producers of Climate Challenge are in a minority. Most would much rather hang on to their products for years, sometimes long after they have recovered their full investment.

It isn't just climate-related films that are locked up in such copyright restrictions. Every year, hundreds of TV programmes or video films are made on a variety of development and conservation topics. They are supported by public, corporate or philanthropic funds.

These would typically be aired once, twice or at best a few times and then relegated to a shelf somewhere. A few may be released on DVD or adapted for online use. A majority will, however, be confined to the archival 'black holes' from where they might never emerge again.

Yet most such films have a long shelf-life and multiple, secondary use outside the broadcast industry — if only their copyrights were not so tight.

Even when film-makers or producers themselves are keen for their creations to have a life beyond broadcasts, company policies get in the way. In large broadcast or film production companies, lawyers and accountants — not journalists or producers — decide how and where content is distributed.

SOCIAL CHANGE

Broadcast mandarins routinely support global struggles against poverty, HIV, corruption and climate change by offering free airtime to carry public interest messages. But few let go of their own products on these very subjects for non-broadcast uses.

Communicating for social change is a slow, incremental process. Broadcasts are good at flagging important issues, but real engagement happens in classrooms, training centres and other small groups where screenings can stir up deeper discussions. Combining broadcast and narrowcast outreach vastly increases chances of changing people's attitudes and, ultimately, their behaviour.

Our Tokyo workshop participants have backgrounds in broadcasting or independent film-making — we already knew how copyrights generate income for our industries. But if moving images are to play a decisive role in the climate debate, we argued, TV programmes and video films on the subject need to be much more freely available, accessible and useable.

That's why we called for climate change to be designated as a 'copyright free zone'. This would instantly multiply the resource materials available to thousands of educators, social activists and trainers across the majority world currently struggling to communicate this complex topic to their audiences. Moving images would make their task easier.

For years, broadcasters have dutifully reported evolving scientific and political aspects of climate change. These measures are necessary but not sufficient. By relaxing copyrights on their climate-related media products, they can become part of a global search for solutions.

The climate crisis challenges everyone to adopt extraordinary measures. Broadcasters and filmmakers now need to balance their financial interests with planetary survival.

What use is intellectual property on a dead planet?

(*Nalaka Gunawardene is Director of TVE Asia Pacific, a regionally operating non-profit media foundation. He blogs on media, society and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com.)