Trafficking (in) the Archive: Canada, Copyright, and the Study of Television

Abstract

Our essay is indebted to the idea of trafficking, that is, to the idea that the movement of certain things, in certain contexts, is illicit. We propose in this paper that the dissemination of knowledge for most media scholarship in Canada inherently involves trafficking in covert archives. Our particular interest is in television texts and the idea that, within the increasingly constricting context of Canadian copyright and privacy laws, using, sharing, format shifting, copying, screening, and teaching Canadian television texts are collectively an illegal activity. We are certainly not the first ones to make note of this movement. In 1990, Mary Jane Miller wrote a piece that was included in the proceedings stemming from a symposium of the International Council of Archives by the National Archives of Canada. It is called, wonderfully, Archives from the Point of View of the Scholarly User: or, If I died and went to a platonic archetype of a sound and moving images archive this is what I'd find. In it, she describes the televisual scholar's archival paradise. It's a place where there are archivists who know and value the work of the television scholar. It's a place where one can sit and watch or read through all sorts of mate - rial, because a television archive should not just contain television texts but also all sorts of written materials (scripts, memos, reviews, letters)