Well, the Alternative Awards ceremony/party has happened, and the winners have been declared. Winners are noted on the Nominations page. Thanks to Kirsten for being my partner in making this happen, and thanks to those of you who came to our party, watched online, sent in nominations and/or votes, or otherwise took an interest in what we were doing. We will consider all the aspects of this experience in figuring out how to approach it next year.
I assembled clip packages for all of the awards, trying to capture the essence of the material even though I had not seen it all. The purpose was to give a flavour of the film or show, so viewers could put together their own personal list of the nominees which appealed to them. Voting for winners is part of the process, but the core purpose here was to expose viewers to a list of media they may not have otherwise encountered.
As a result of these clip packages, our live stream video was flagged by YouTube for copyright violation. I had suspected this might happen, as it did during my live stream testing earlier in the week. In Canada, there is a “Fair Dealing” exception to copyright law (similar to the US “Fair Use” doctrine) which covers several types of uses for copyright works which do not require specific authorization. The types which I think are relevant to this case are education, criticism, and review.
Clearly there are elements of criticism and review here, which should exempt us, although in those cases the critic or reviewer must be named (which isn’t really the case on our YouTube channel), and the source and author of the work must be credited. In our clip packages, in all cases the source of the work is noted but the author is NOT noted in all cases. I would argue, though, that the education exemption also applies in this case, because this is more than a straightforward awards show and aims specifically to highlight a group of films and TV shows which may not be well known to people. and that the event as a whole aims to educate viewers about the variety of stories by and about marginalized people. The education exemption requires no specific action to be taken in order to be legitimate.
Ultimately, a copyright battle is not my goal here. Several of our clips were flagged as not being able to be monetized, which is fine since we are not intending here to benefit financially from the works of others, but a few were flagged as not able to be seen at all. The archived video of the live stream was blocked on these grounds, so I have used the Youtube interface to trim the three “cannot be seen” clips out of the stream, leaving the rest intact. This way, we are in compliance with the copyright holders’ flags, and our viewers still have our program available to them, with just title cards representing the nominees in some cases. I think this is the best way to preserve our presentation within the bounds of acceptable use of these copyrighted works.