‘The toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube,” I said, gazing at the computer screen.
Across the room, she paused before intoning: “The eagle flies at dawn.”
This perplexed me. “Pardon?”
“My fault,” she said, “I thought we were speaking in Second World War spy movie code.”
No, no, I was on YouTube, watching the Prancercise video, in which a 61-year-old Florida woman in a pink sweater set demonstrates the latest exercise craze, which involves prancing like a horse.
A week ago, the video was unknown. By Friday, it had 2.3 million views. By Saturday morning, four million. Today, it’s probably up to five. No, six. Too late. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.
So it is with Dan Murphy’s $90,000 Duffy Buck.
You might have read about it in this space last Sunday. The Bank of Canada, citing criminal and copyright law, was trying to suppress B.C. cartoonist Murphy’s shot at Mike Duffy. Based on a $50 bill, it features a picture of the senator and has a face value of $90,000. In the animated version of the cartoon, (you can YouTube it) Duffy belches.
The bank ordered Murphy’s syndicate, Edmonton-based Artizans, to remove the cartoon from its website. You can’t reproduce a bill without our permission, the bank said. Then it brought up the part that really made Murphy spit out his coffee: The law lets the bank reject any proposals that “tarnish the dignity and importance of currency to Canadians.”
Artizans initially pulled the cartoon but, after determining it was on the side of the angels, restored the image to the web.
No one would ever mistake the $90,000 Duffy Buck for a real bill, Artizans’ Malcolm Mayes, himself an editorial cartoonist, wrote to the Bank of Canada. Seeking the bank’s permission to draw a banknote would be impractical for cartoonists on daily deadlines and, besides, copyright law makes allowances for satire. Stifling free speech to protect the “dignity” of currency is offensive.
His opinion was echoed by University of Toronto law professor Ariel Katz, who posted on a blog: “Murphy’s cartoon is clearly a parody or satire, and his work would probably satisfy the factors of fairness quite easily. Therefore, no permission is required, and whether the bank would grant one or not is irrelevant. Period.
“Even if or when permission were required, the Bank of Canada surely has some obligation to respect freedom of expression. …The bank’s failure to recognize that is probably more damaging to Canada than any cartoon.”
In other words, The Man risks a PR disaster when he wields copyright law like a sledgehammer. The International Olympic Committee is infamous for going Taliban on any mom-and-pop pizza shop that dare uses the O-word. A decade ago, Starbucks looked like a big green ogre when it sued the 60-seat HaidaBucks coffee shop in Masset.
“It’s almost as though some of these big companies are so big that they have a vice-president for shooting themselves in the feet,” Murphy said Saturday.
Not that he’s complaining. All the commotion is driving traffic to his cartoon. “It’s thriving out there, in major part because of the Bank of Canada’s ham-handed attempts to censor fair comment and parody.”
It recalls the fuss that erupted a couple of years ago when Enbridge objected to Murphy’s oil-drenched parody of a Northern Gateway television commercial. That kerfuffle, along with this one, gave Murphy his two most popular animated pieces. “I’m just hoping I can make this a regular partnership with multinationals and government agencies,” he says.
This should serve as a cautionary tale to any organization that thinks it can force the toothpaste back in the tube. One of the best comments was appended to one of the many news sites to pick up Murphy’s story this week:
“What I find most amusing these days is the scrambling done by traditional businesses/institutions when they come upon the reality that is social networking,” wrote a man named John Collins. “Yes, by all means, remove that picture from your site. And also remove the 5,312 shares and the 4,673 reposts, disable the 15 mirror sites that have duplicate copies by now, go to Google and remove the cached version of the page, and take it down from everybody’s Facebook page.
“And please notify me when you’ve done so. Oh, also, stop those crazy kids and their rock music.”
