Blog /What Isn't Being Said About the Hockey Night in Canada Theme

June 10, 2008 15:45 +0000  |  Canada Copyright 7

For those of you who haven't yet heard the news, CBC has lost the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme. You know the tune, "da dada dada, da dada dada..." -- I'd include an MP3 here but I'm having trouble finding one.

It turns out that the song's composer and owner Dolores Claman was asking for just too much money for the re-use of the song on the CBC. They offered her $1million and she turned it down, asking instead for a cool $2.5million to $3million! The CBC is taxpayer-funded people. It can't justify that kind of expense.

And so the song was instead sold to CTV/TSN, a component of CTV Globe Meia's massive conglomerate. They can afford an insane price for a jingle and frankly, it's quite the coup for them. Those notes are Canada's unofficial second anthem. Everyone knows it, and everyone knows it means hockey.

A lot of people are really pissed off about this, and they should be, but not for the reasons about which they seem to be shouting.

Some people are mad at Claman, who's simply exploiting an opportunity for the maximum available profit. It may be a pretty mean thing to do, but she "owns" the song and under our laws, she has every right to do what she's done.

Others are mad at the CBC for not just paying the $2.5million. I'm guessing that these people just have no understanding of what little money a public prodcaster has to work with.

No one however, is talking about the real problem here: that song has been part of Canadian culture for 40 years. Claman has been fully compensated under the terms of a financial contract for the entirety of those years and by all rights, the Canadian people should own that song to do with as we please.

How long should we allow copyright to exist on something so tightly woven into our culture? Isn't 40years of royalties enough to push a song into the public domain? Why should one person have the right to sign over the "ownership" of a song to a corporation in perpetuity?

Listening to CBC Radio One yesterday the broadcasters were joking about how they couldn't even hum it anymore, because the song is owned by someone else. One of the men thought he'd be light-hearted about the whole thing: "How 'bout we just do it one last time? Da dada dada --"

"Ahh, lets not do that" the second man cut in. Clearly, he was nervous about the legal implications of humming our unofficial national anthem.

Comments

Taavi Burns
10 Jun 2008, 5:49 p.m.  | 

Yeah, this is reminding me a lot of a book I read recently, "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig: http://www.free-culture.cc/.

Pity.

Robin Badr
10 Jun 2008, 11:53 p.m.  | 

Did you know that "Happy Birthday To You" is still under copyright?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyright_status

Daniel
11 Jun 2008, 12:17 a.m.  | 

I did indeed. It was featured in The Corporation ;-)

Sara
11 Jun 2008, 7:46 p.m.  | 

You know.. I couldn't even hum the Hockey Night in Canada theme until someone reminded me.

Roland
13 Jun 2008, 3:52 a.m.  | 

Not only does she get the money, any untalented ne'er-do-well offspring or assignees get the benefit for 70 years after she dies. The suspicion is that, as Mickey Mouse approaches the cut-off, so will copyright be extended, not reduced. There's a lot of early 20th century material that some big corporations rely on.

Michael Geist has a good post recently about Crown copyright on a similar issue.

I see it both ways - if you are a poor-struggling artist, copyright can get you a foothold. That was why it was created back in the 1600s-1700s I believe. Just because something is old does not mean it sucks, as Michael Geist seems to imply. But it can be abused, for sure, and the digital revolution has entirely changed the way we should look at it.

Looking at Wikipedia and reading between the lines, I reckon Claman may be exerting a bit of revenge for CBC being stupid enough to sell ringtones without her permission. A shame Canadians have to suffer - which they will on TSN.

The CBC should pick up all the fantastic tunes that the BBC used for its sports in the UK, before it lost all its rights to Sky (News Corp channel, same as Fox News). Most of them dated back before the war and had never been changed. Marvellous. Sport has not been the same since.

Lara
14 Jun 2008, 3:02 a.m.  | 

Why does it say there are 4 comments here when there are 5?

Lara
14 Jun 2008, 3:03 a.m.  | 

OK now it's actually saying how many there are. But seriously, I was here and I refreshed a bunch of times and it kept lying.

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