There is a strong bias against black and immigrant men in Canadian newspaper coverage of HIV nondisclosure trials, according to a new study.
The report is titled Callous, cold, and deliberately duplicitous: Racialization, immigration and the representation of HIV criminalization in Canadian mainstream newspapers. It analyzed 1680 English-language newspaper articles about criminal HIV nondisclosure – where a person living with HIV was criminally charged for not disclosing their status to an uninfected partner.
The study found stories about black and immigrant men were vastly overrepresented in the press over the last 28 years. Though black and immigrant males make up about 20 per cent of the 181 people convicted for this crime in Canada, they account for 69 per cent of the newspaper stories, according to the report.
“What we found is that newspapers really overwhelmingly and I think unjustifiably focused on cases that involved black, immigrant male defendants and what results is a kind of prejudicial coverage of cases that involve black men,” said Eric Mykhalovsky, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at York University. “It’s almost a sort of ‘racial profiling’ of HIV nondisclosure as a crime of black men despite the fact that most of the defendants are in fact white.”
Mykhalovsky and his team also analyzed the individual content contained in the stories associated with many cases. Four specific cases involving African, Caribbean, or American black men living with HIV, garnered nearly half of all the newspaper stories in the study. The immigration status of each defendant and their mugshot figure prominently in the coverage and talks about their “exotic strains” of HIV, making them appear as a foreign originator of the virus.
“At the start it will maybe be something like ‘so-and-so from Uganda,’” he added, “and then it’s ‘Ugandan-born’ and then by the end of it, the person is ‘the Ugandan.’ That’s the sort of coverage with one of the individuals that we looked at. There’s a continual emphasis of the person not being from Canada.”
In one case that garnered nearly a quarter of all the newspaper coverage, former Saskatchewan Roughrider Trevis Smith was repeatedly referred to as a “reckless” and “dangerous,” an “Alabama native” who had “come in and disrupted [perceived] wholesome prairie culture,” Mychalovsky said. Smith was charged with aggravated sexual assault and eventually deported back to the U.S. He did not transmit the virus to the complainants in his case.
In Canada, people living with HIV must disclose their status to partners before engaging in vaginal or anal sex or potentially face the very serious charge of aggravated sexual assault. It carries a maximum life sentence and potential sex offender registration, even if no transmission occurs. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that putting a sexual partner at “significant risk” of HIV exposure is enough to constitute an assault, even if the latest science says that people taking antiretroviral drugs to suppress their viral load to undetectable levels in the blood are virtually uninfectious.
“It’s the same pattern of coverage,” Mykhalovsky said, “the same type of story that’s being told, how this black man is presented as a sort of sexual casanova with a rampant sex drive who is deceiving and tricking women into having sex.”
Valérie Pierre-Pierre, director of the African and Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario, says the report confirms what she and the people living with HIV who she works with have known all along.
“I personally consider this type of coverage to be violent, a type of violence against black communities,” said Pierre-Pierre, who also served on the advisory committee for the study. “People living with HIV, whether they’re black, white, Asian, no matter where they come from or how they identify their race or ethnicity, are people and I think there needs to be a humane approach to how reports or articles are being written about HIV, people who are living with HIV.”
There is a broadening consensus among AIDS service organizations and activists that the law needs to catch up with the science, but both Pierre-Pierre and Mykhalovsky say the coverage continues to focus on the criminality of a very small number of people living with the virus.
“The way articles are being written, you have the nice stories that come around World AIDS Day on December 1, but apart from that they are othered, stigmatized in media portrayal,” said Pierre-Pierre.
The report recommends assigning health reporters to HIV criminalization stories rather than crime reporters and avoiding the use of mug shots, which the report says only further emphasizes the race of the accused. Reporters need to seek out more people living with HIV and AIDS service organizations that have intimate knowledge of the disease.
Pierre-Pierre emphasizes that the vast majority of people living with HIV are well aware of the risks and always engage in conversations with their partners about the latest science about treatment and risk, “because if you’re in treatment, you talk to your medical practitioner, you have conversations, you understand how it works, so you don’t intentionally put people at risk,” she said.
“I think it needs to be covered in such a way that it’s made clear that [nondisclosure] is not the norm and that they are actually outliers, and it’s often more complex than people think.”
But having people talk about how the media should cover a story and what the media can do to change its attitude toward stories are two different things. Desmond Cole, a columnist for the Toronto Star, former CANADALAND COMMONS host, and prominent commentator on racial politics in the city, thinks papers need to work harder at telling more than one type of story about a particular community.
“This is part of the reason why we talk incessantly about diversity in newsrooms,” said Cole. “It’s not just about tokenism. It’s not just about being able to say that one or two of us are there. It’s that we are probably, given our life experiences, more likely to see something like that and start asking questions.”
Editors should also be aware of who they are assigning to stories and, Cole said, if these common cliches appear in stories, then they should assign writers that understand their harm. It comes down to the need to constantly reassess how journalists’ personal biases about race, HIV, or other forms of identity play out in their coverage of stories.
“All the biases that tend to play out in our country on a day-to-day basis are going to play out  in the media, so if our country in general is suspicious of newcomers, which we know Canada is, then that’s going to potentially play out in any story involving those folks and that’s just a thing to be mindful of.”

For one day this week, Kellie Leitch wasn’t the focus of press coverage in the Conservative leadership race. Her rival Maxime Bernier captured some headlines with a plan to drastically change the CBC’s mandate and funding model, removing ads and slashing funding.
Then Leitch jumped on the same topic, and trumped Bernier’s radical plan with a downright extreme one.
“My fellow leadership candidate, Maxime Bernier, has called for CBC reforms. I totally disagree,” she said in a Facebook post. “The CBC doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be dismantled. Period.”
The press took the bait. Stories quickly appeared from the Toronto Star, iPolitics, the National Post, and The Canadian Press.
It’s part of a running pattern for a candidate who’s stealing tone, tactics and even tweet style from the victorious Donald Trump campaign. The similarities are hard to ignore.
Here’s Leitch praising Trump:
“Tonight our American cousins threw out the elites and elected Donald Trump as their next president. It’s an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well. It’s the message I’m bringing with my campaign to be the next prime minister of Canada.”
Here’s Leitch tweeting like Trump:

The Liberal decision to fund UNRWA, a group with alleged ties to terrorist organization Hamas, is outrageous and dangerous. Bad judgement!
— Kellie Leitch (@KellieLeitch) November 17, 2016

Look at the way Crooked Hillary is handling the e-mail case and the total mess she is in. She is unfit to be president. Bad judgement!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2016

Here’s Leitch being belligerent with the press, like Trump.
Here’s Leitch misspelling a bunch of simple words, which was taken by some as a deliberate attempt to get “elites” to mock her, like they did Trump:

Multiple typos in this Kellie Leitch announcement, including misspelling @MaximeBernier’s name. pic.twitter.com/TtGsD4Er0T
— Jason Fekete (@jasonfekete) November 24, 2016

It keeps them mocking her, which is the whole point. https://t.co/WlHzcvAKS3
— Chris Selley (@cselley) November 24, 2016

But Leitch’s most successful media tactic is unique to Canada, and she has exploited a major vulnerability in our media to catapult her once-faltering candidacy.
Even before Donald Trump won his shocking upset victory, the Canadian press was doing what it always does with a big U.S. story: looking for a “Canadian angle.”
Leitch has positioned herself as the embodiment of this angle. If the press needs a Canadian Trump, she’s happy to play the part, in contrast to what she said to the CBC when The Donald was down in the polls, and her Canadian-values pitch was getting a Trump comparison: “This isn’t the same thing … this is about having a conversation about our Canadian values, about what we’re about, about a positive, constructive conversation about the reality of the values that built our nation.”
Google Trends* shows searches for Leitch spiked well above of her rivals as soon as she explicitly linked herself to Trump on election day. While searches for her name have dropped off slightly in the intervening weeks, her name is still being searched about 10 times more on average than Lisa Raitt’s.
Google searches for the top five candidates over the last month. Searches for Leitch, in blue, show a sharp peak just after election day in the U.S.
This leads to a question: After watching the American news media fuel Trump’s ascent with nonstop free coverage, are we making the same mistake in Canada?
Since sending a notice to her supporters about how excited she was that Trump was elected, Leitch’s campaign has garnered daily coverage. She’s getting the benefit of news stories, column piled on column. Most of the coverage trends negative, but that doesn’t seem to matter because Leitch has positioned herself as the anti-elite candidate. It doesn’t matter she’s a surgeon with an MBA who used to sit in cabinet any more than it matters that Trump flies around in a 757 with his name on it. This isn’t about reality, it’s about image and it’s about name recognition — thanks to two weeks of constant press, Leitch now has it.
Leitch has used every opportunity to link herself with the U.S. president-elect. She quickly put out a news release comparing her vision to Trump’s on election night. Leitch explicitly said she shared some of his values at a recent leadership debate. It’s unlikely the press in Canada actually want to create our own Trump, but our storytelling reflexes are leading us down that path.
Of course, Leitch has not simply been mimicking Trump’s style. She has also been aping his policies — policies Canadians arguably rejected last election.
When their prospects dimmed in the last federal election, the Conservatives turned to thinly veiled anti-Muslim xenophobia. The party got thumped for it, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals got a majority. Canadian voters explicitly rejected this sort of politicking by a tired government.
Leitch made a tearful apology for being a part of the “barbaric cultural practices” hotline launch, set up so neighbours could snitch on the “cultural practices” of their implicitly Muslim  neighbours.
Her contrition was soon abandoned. Leitch has made screening immigrants for ill-defined “Canadian values” the central plank of her campaign. Media outlets began polling on whether her values pitch was working (notably using her terminology to do so) and they found many Canadians approved of the idea. This, in turn, fed back into Leitch’s campaign as proof she was on the right direction. The press then fed on this, and Leitch landed on the cover of Maclean’s, defiantly holding a Maple Leaf.
The cover of the Maclean’s Magazine Oct. 3 Issue.
Of course, the coverage is often negative. But there’s so much of it! Leitch has been condemned in editorials in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail (and praised by editorials in the Toronto Sun). Her pitch has been discussed at length in columns in the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, and CBC. By way of contrast, Leitch’s opponent Michael Chong only seems to get wide coverage when he’s attacking Leitch or taking part in scheduled debates.
A quick search for “Leitch” and “Trump” since the U.S. election on the media-monitoring website Infomart, and you get nearly 300 hits for stories in newspapers from around the country. And those are just the articles making the direct link between the two. Search the same website for “Maxime Bernier” — another of the leading Tory candidates, polling eight points behind Leitch — and you get 50 results over the same period.
But it’s hard to measure true support of candidates in the leadership. There are polls that show Leitch leading the pack, but there are a dozen people looking to win the top job. In the latest poll, nearly as many people are undecided as they are for Leitch. And that assumes the polls are at all trustworthy to begin with. Our confidence in polling is lower than ever, but Leitch’s numbers are showing a clearly upward trend. As she gains more attention and recognition, her numbers are following suit.
There’s one last way to measure support in the race: fundraising. In that metric Leitch is also leading. She’s been able to pull in about $450,000, according the latest fundraising documents reported by Postmedia. Following close on her heels is Quebec MP Maxime Bernier who’s raised about $425,000. After that the totals quickly fall off with Michael Chong pulling in about $200,000. (Many of the other candidates have only recently joined the race, and not had to file the paperwork for how much they’ve raised.)
Leitch’s lead, whether it’s real or just perceived, has another effect. Her platform is now seen as viable and maybe even popular. This is giving other candidates the opening to use her ideas for their own benefit. Quebec MP and former public safety minister Steven Blaney stepped into the race on a platform promising to screen immigrants “understanding and appreciation of Canada’s core principles.”
Kellie Leitch is on the path to victory. If she wins, the press will have played a major role in promoting her name and legitimizing her, even while decrying her. The possibility of simply ignoring a once-fringe candidate with ideas rejected by most Canadians, has already passed.
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editor@canadalandshow.com
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Google Trends uses a relative scale to compare how popular different searches are. It does not give the absolute number of searches made for any given term. From the Trends website: “Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than 1 per cent as popular as the peak.”

Staffers describe grim mood as company slashes payroll

A group of high-ranking former producers and executives at CBC, calling themselves Public Broadcasting in Canada for the 21st Century, have submitted a proposal to the Heritage Ministry, calling for an ad-free CBC.
The signees include Bernie Lucht, the former Executive Producer of the CBC Radio show Ideas, and Jeffrey Dvorkin, former Managing Editor and Chief Journalist for CBC Radio, and former ombudsman of NPR Radio. Dvorkin currently runs the University of Toronto’s Journalism department. They write:
It has become obvious to many that requiring our public broadcaster to apply the practices of the private sector to its civic and cultural mission has not resulted in the creation of a large body of distinctive, informative and inspiring social and cultural capital for Canadians. While French services and English Radio have fared better, it has turned CBC English television into what its own executives have described as a “publicly subsidized commercial network.” 
[…]
…we recommend that all the services provided by the CBC/Radio-Canada must be non-commercial, including its online operations. 
Green Party leader Elizabeth May retweeted (but did not endorse) CANADALAND publisher Jesse Brown’s message in support of an #AdFreeCBC.
And Conservative Party leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier laid out his vision for the CBC on Wednesday. Bernier wants to severely limit the CBC’s mandate, but also want the broadcaster to replace its revenue from ads through donations from the public, in a way similar to PBS and NPR in the U.S.:
All private media outlets have had to make deep cuts and to lay off journalists by the hundreds in the past few years. Yet, after getting a head start with more than a billion dollars in taxpayers’ money, CBC/Radio-Canada unfairly competes with struggling private media in a shrinking advertisement market.
To replace its revenues from advertisement, which amounted to about $250 million last year, the CBC/Radio-Canada will have to switch to the PBS/NPR model in the US and rely on sponsorships from corporations and foundations, as well as voluntary donations from its viewers and listeners. Of course, changes to the structure of CBC/Radio-Canada will also require changes to the Broadcasting Act.
Michael Geist is a University of Ottawa law professor with an expertise in the digital space. His argument for an ad-free CBC is based on the idea a publicly funded news outlet should be competing for ad dollars on top of eyeballs.
While the CBC should be responding to its audience with a strong digital news service, it does not follow that it should also compete for digital advertising dollars. As noted in the CBC letter, its total digital advertising revenues are relatively small (and they are even smaller — roughly $6 million — for the online news service) so the foregone earnings will not have a material impact on the CBC. However, there is a market effect of having the CBC compete for ad dollars that affects news organizations of all sizes. This includes large players like the Globe as well as smaller, independent media for whom a loss of thousands in advertising can be significant. An ad-free online service would better justify the public investment in the public broadcaster, make for an enhanced user experience, and remove the concern that the CBC is harming private sector alternatives by competing for advertising dollars.
The full text of the Public Broadcasting in Canada for the 21st Century submission can be found here:
PBC21 Submission PDF

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editor@canadalandshow.com

The morning show host on Ottawa’s most popular news talk station will headline a political fundraiser for the Ontario PC Party next month, in what appears to be a clear conflict of interest.
Bill Carroll, host of CFRA’s Morning Rush, will be the headliner at an early-December fundraiser for Goldie Ghamari and the Carleton PC riding association. The fundraiser is billed as “Dinner in the Dark” an event using “minimal hydro.” For $100, guests get dinner and will hear Carroll speak. For $150, donors get attend a “meet and greet with Bill.”

Tired of over-paying for #hydro? Join @billcarrolltalk, @carleton_pc & me on Dec 7 for #DinnerintheDark! #Ottawa #ottcity #onpoli #PCPO pic.twitter.com/dUcmnu0gZq
— Goldie Ghamari, MPP | گلسا قمری (@gghamari) November 19, 2016

The director of Bell Media’s news and local stations division, Matthew Garrow, said there was no problem with Carroll appearing at the fundraiser. “It is important to note that Bill’s talk show is not a news program, but instead an opinion show that, by definition, reflects his personal views and opinions.”
“Bill is not a reporter, but instead his role is like that of a columnist — one who is clearly opinionated but entirely open minded to the facts of the issues he raises during his show,” Garrow said.
At other news organizations, columnists are treated no differently than reporters. They don’t typically offer themselves to politicians looking to fundraise. In many cases it is explicitly prohibited.
Garrow said Carroll was not being paid for his appearance. But Garrow did not reply to follow up questions. He was asked whether Carroll’s appearance would be considered a donation of his services, as laid out in the Ontario’s election finance laws. He also did not respond when asked where the line is drawn for staff at Bell news organizations for political participation. If we receive an answer, we’ll update our story.
CFRA screenshot
Carroll has said on Twitter he does not consider himself a journalist, despite being an on-air host at a station billed as “news talk radio.” He’s a frequent and vocal critic of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government, but said he would appear at a Liberal event if he were ever asked.

and I would speak at a Liberal event too if they asked.
— Bill Carroll (@billcarrolltalk) November 18, 2016

Questions to CTV Ottawa’s news director Peter Angione, who oversees CFRA’s news operation, were forwarded along to Garrow. Questions sent to Carroll received no response.
Ghamari is the provincial Tory candidate* in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton.
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editor@canadalandshow.com
*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Ghamari was a candidate for the PC nomination in her riding. That was incorrect, she’s already won the nomination. We regret the error.

“If you are a Radio One listener who doesn’t want ads on the Radio One of the near-future, now is a very good time to say so.”

Reporter posts Instagram pic of gift from affiliated jewellery shop

The online Ottawa news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter failed to convince a judge the sharing of two of its articles among six government staffers required a $17,209.10 subscription for the whole finance department.
Federal Court Justice Robert Barnes threw out the case Thursday, saying in a written judgement the Finance Department staffers that shared the article didn’t infringe on Blacklock’s copyright and their sharing of the article was covered under fair dealing.
“What occurred here was no more than the simple act of reading by persons with an immediate interest in the material,” Justice Robert Barnes wrote. “The act of reading, by itself, is an exercise that will almost always constitute fair dealing even when it is carried out solely for personal enlightenment or entertainment.”
The stories in question were about a “sugar tax” that was considered by the finance department. It was written by Blacklock’s managing editor Tom Korski.
Sandra Marsden, the president of the Canadian Sugar Institute was quoted at some length in the article and she was sent a teaser email when the story was published. She thought the teaser cast her comments in a negative light, according to the written judgement, so she bought a personal subscription to Blacklock’s Reporter to view the whole article.
When she read it, she passed it along to a staffer at the finance department, worried it would sour her relationship with the government. She copied the full text of the article into an email and sent it off to Patrick Halley in the international trade division. Halley then sent it along to five more people including a press secretary who had sent comments to Korski for the article. The same thing basically happened when a second article was published the next day.
Blacklock’s found all this out by sending in an access to information request. When they saw their articles had been shared within a department that didn’t have a corporate subscription, they sued for copyright infringement.
But Barnes found the reading and sharing of the stories was all covered by fair use. All of the people sent the story had some interest in its contents, and no one was looking to profit of the sharing. “I am satisfied that the department’s acknowledged use of the two Blacklock’s articles constituted fair dealing. There is no question that the circulation of this news copy within the department was done for a proper research purpose,” Barnes wrote. “There is also no question that the admitted scope of use was, in the circumstances, fair.”
The government had argued Blacklock’s was a copyright troll, sending out teasers to pique the interest of people quoted in an article, then filing access to information requests and catching them reading and sharing an article without a department-wide subscription. But the judge didn’t find it necessary to assess those claims. “Although there are certainly some troubling aspects to Blacklock’s business practices it is unnecessary to resolve the Attorney General’s allegation that this litigation constitutes a form of copyright abuse by a copyright troll,” he wrote, as the case was decided on other merits.
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editor@canadalandshow.com

A Facebook privacy case that could change the way Canadian law looks at how we provide consent online, and whether internet companies based elsewhere can be sued in Canada made its way to the Supreme Court last week.
The key issue is whether a class-action lawsuit against Facebook can be heard in B.C., where the case was filed. The terms of use people agree to when they use Facebook say any lawsuit against the company must be filed where it’s headquartered, in California.
“Anytime you make a contract with another province or another country, the contract will normally be drafted so as to say that the laws of this place or that place applies, and that’s because you need to make a choice as to whose laws apply, otherwise there’s chaos,” said Andrew Roman, a class action legal expert in Ontario. “A company like Facebook, because it’s on the internet, has no specific geographic location and would want all the cases against it in its own state, so that it doesn’t have to hire lawyers all over the world.”
Forum selection clauses in contracts, like the one in Facebook’s terms of use, have in the past been encouraged by courts, as they’re more convenient in our globalized world. Whether that remains the same in the digital world is part of what’s at stake.
The case dates back to 2011, when Facebook launched its “Sponsored Stories” advertising service. Advertisers would pay to feature a user’s name and photo next to their product or service. Those Sponsored Stories would be sent to the users’ friends, completely unknown to the person whose photo appears in the ad. That way, it would appear to the person’s contacts they liked a product, as though it were an endorsement. Facebook dropped the Sponsored Stories program in early 2014.
Deborah Douez, a Vancouver videographer, launched the lawsuit on behalf of other British Columbians who she claimed had their privacy violated by this practice. In 2014, the B.C. Supreme Court decided that Douez should be able to sue in B.C. as opposed to California, lest it weaken the province’s Privacy Act, and certified the case to proceed. The B.C. Court of Appeal overturned that decision the following year.
“The case obviously deals with online jurisdiction but also online consumer protection and privacy,” said Karen Eltis, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in privacy and internet law. “It goes to the heart of something that’s been gnawing at us for years, which is the meaning of consent in the digital age.”
Roman, meanwhile, suspects that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in order to support the Court of Appeal decision, and provide guidance to other courts across Canada that the forum selection clauses in terms of use like Facebook’s should be upheld.
Eltis is not so sure that’s the case.
“Very often online, we increasingly notice that true consent has lost its meaning to a significant degree,” Eltis said. “If we want to avail ourselves of these free services, for all intents and purposes, that have come to shape our daily existence, then we really have no other choice to but consent.”
To Eltis, that defies the traditional meaning of consent, and the case gives the Supreme Court the opportunity to review take-it-or-leave-it forum selection clauses. Eltis says that one of the key reasons of why the notion is changing is because of privacy is given a different legal weight in Canada and the U.S.
“In the United States more generally, you need a financial aspect to privacy harm in order to recover [damages],” said Eltis. “It’s a much more stringent understanding. In Canada we’re hybrid with regard to privacy — we stand somewhere between the United States and Europe. And in many cases, the Supreme Court has recognized that privacy harm in the digital age does not have to be of a financial nature. That is a significant departure.”
The conflict in forum selection clauses becomes apparent if a case must be heard in a jurisdiction where a different value on privacy is held. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, intervening in the case, argued there needs to be a new test on the enforcement of forum selection clauses for the protection of constitutional and quasi-constitutional rights such as privacy. The CCLA said the previous test predates the creation of Facebook or social media in general.
“This case provides an opportunity to provide guidance to lower courts and the business community,” argued CCLA lawyer Cynthia Kuehl.
Douez’s lawyer, Christopher Rhone, stated that if the case were applied under California law that it wouldn’t succeed.
The Court reserved judgment, meaning a verdict could be months away.

CBC is pressuring a podcast app developer to remove its programming, because the app has ads. The Mother Corp. has sent legal threats to at least one third-party podcast app developer for serving ads without a prior agreement with the broadcaster.
A spokesman for CBC wouldn’t say which app was served notice, but users of the Android app Podcast Republic found this week they couldn’t download CBC shows anymore. Turns out, that was by design. The developer blocked all the programming, at the request of CBC.

It's not a bug. All CBC programs have been blocked by this app per request from CBC.
— Podcast Republic (@castrepublic) November 7, 2016

The broadcaster has begun warning third-parties running ads they are in violation of CBC’s terms of service. A copy of the email was posted to reddit, with the name of podcast app that received it removed:
I am contacting you regarding the unauthorized use of CBC’s podcasts that are being used in your [app name] app.
By using CBC’s digital services you have agreed to our our Terms of Use located at cbc.ca/aboutcbc/discover/termsofuse.html.
Under section 2(b) of these Terms of Use, you are prohibited from using our podcasts for commercial purposes without a proper licence from CBC.
I would ask to cease immediately the use of our unlicensed podcasts.
If you interested in CBC content and podcast, we can discuss a license fee model.
I would be happy to have a call to discuss further our content and services.
The section of CBC’s terms of use they point developers to reads:
Do these terms of use apply to news feeds (RSS)?
Yes. These terms also apply to the use of CBC/Radio-Canada news feeds. Any use other than for private purposes must be subject to an agreement specifying the conditions for use with due regard for the integrity of the content. You agree not to frame the news feed or its content, nor to use similar means to generate unauthorized benefits.
“Unauthorized benefits” in this case seem to include money from advertising. CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson said the public broadcaster doesn’t allow any third-party to use their programming and offer ads, without an explicit agreement in place with CBC.
Apps use news feeds provided by different podcasters to update their content. A podcast RSS feed is essentially a database that shows an app what episodes of a show are available, and where to download them. CBC’s feeds are all publicly available.
But, Podcast Republic is far from the only podcast player that has in-app adds. Android app PodcastAddict displays banner adds, so does Overcast for iOS devices. Stitcher, another popular service, has display and audio ads. Podcast Republic, like many others, also offers users the option to pay a fee to use the app ad-free.
Thompson would only say that one developer had been sent the notice, but would not divulge which one.