Video sticker police state

>> How Quebec's laws restrict your film diet

by MICHAEL CITROME

Whenever you buy a videotape or DVD, it's carrying a hitchhiker. It's a square blue sticker with the name and a rating. Lose it and HMV won't give you a refund. But who knew one little sticker could be so devious?

Those stickers are provincially mandated by an act of the Régie du cinéma, Quebec's regulatory body for motion pictures. Part censorship, part protection against piracy, the stickers are the government's way of controlling what spins inside our DVD players and VCRs.

When the government created the new cinema act back in '83, a state-of-the-art VCR was a top-loading monstrosity that looked like someone ripped it out of HAL's dashboard. At that time, video rental was a pretty new thing and unscrupulous retailers saw nothing wrong with purchasing a legit copy of The Muppets Take Manhattan and dubbing a dozen to rent to customers. So the cinema act placed ID stickers on every rented video. Inspectors could easily check up on the legal status of tapes.

But in '91 the Régie extended the sticker requirement to home video sales. For the first time, every video sold in the province of Quebec had to carry a sticker indicating a censor had approved it and a copy is on register.

At first this might just sound like another pain-in-the-ass bureaucratic process, but for Montreal's many ethnic communities, this means that they can't get their videos by legal means. For ethnic retailers who want to sell a few videos alongside their Red Bull and cassava, this means a lengthy application process--often in a language they're unfamiliar with and potentially ending in rejection. This is driving them underground.

On the front lines

Imtiaz Masan deals with the sticker law on a daily basis. His company, Sana Video, is Montreal's main distributor of Indian movies on home video. From his store on Jean-Talon Boulevard in Park Extension, amidst posters of femme fatales in flowing saris and funky badass Sikh private dicks, he provides shops with Bollywood's latest on DVD. "Right now we have over 70 titles," he says.

With DVD popularity rising at a feverish rate, more and more Indian movies are appearing in officially released, consistent and high-quality form, which is a real change for the piracy- plagued industry. Masan is getting more movies daily.

But getting 100 new titles from the loading dock to store shelves is no simple task. Masan spends his evenings filling out government forms describing the plot, background, and copyright- holding information for every movie he stocks.

"We have to write down the story about the movie and indicate the year the movie was released and the director, which company distributes it," he reports. "We have to give them a DVD or a video and they give it a class and certificate."

And a sticker. The stickers cost Masan about a hundred dollars for 75 movies, and that's only if they're all the same title. No sticker and you can get stuck with a fine.

A fine time for cinephiles

The Régie's Responsable des communications, Denis Belleville, is candid about how expensive trouble can get. "If it's just bad luck and one videocassette among many did not have a sticker, there will be a warning and they'll be asked to get a sticker," he says. "If there is a deliberate pattern to sell or rent videos without a sticker, material can be seized and [there can be] a judiciary process leading to a fine and lose confiscated material."

Fines can range from $50 to $100 all the way up to thousands of dollars--and that's not including seizures. "I know of Arab films, Chinese films that have been seized," says Belleville, who adds that the seizures almost inevitably lead to a legal proceeding.

Going through the process has been a hurdle for some communities because like the rest of the provincial government, it follows the French language charter. In other words, the Régie conducts its business exclusively in French. Although Belleville claims that the Régie has tried to make inroads into Quebec's ethnic communities, literature is available only in French.

And in the age of overnight FedEx, the process to gain the right to sell your movies legally is far from instant. "Tonight I'm going to write down the story about one movie," says Masan. "It will take about 10 minutes. Tomorrow I'll go there and pay them. They take about 10-12 days to approve."

By the time Masan gets his DVDs on the shelf, impatient Bollywood trainspotters could have been watching them for days. It's easy--and possibly cheaper--to order DVDs online from any of the myriad of e-tailers peddling Indian movies. You can mail order to your heart's content, free from the shackles of provincial law.

There's no question that local businesses are losing out to this regulatory loophole, one that Belleville says the Régie has no immediate plans to stop up. "These are developments that are being followed by the Régie du cinéma," he says. "We will have to adapt to the new technology, but it's too early to make an assesment of that situation." In the meantime, it's the distribution side of the coin that's causing headaches for Masan and others in his position.

Distribution woes

On the form filled out for every movie, there's a section that concerns the North American distributor. Keep in mind this was a system conceived to protect against piracy--the government wants to make sure you have the right to sell these movies. No North American distributor, no dice, because that means no one has the right to sell the video in Quebec.

This is a problem that affects merchants and movie fans alike--it's Masan's number-1 peeve. Unless a DVD has a North American distributor, Masan can't get permission to sell it, even if it's a legitimate release. But that doesn't mean movie fans won't get it-- pirated tapes are rampant, and there's always the Internet.

Masan describes how movies are released for export in India a week after their theatrical premiere, but most don't have North American distributors, so he can't sell them in Montreal. Meanwhile, across the Ontario border, there's no problem.

"Quebec is the only one that uses stickers," says Masan. "I'm selling also in Ottawa, they don't need stickers. They have a free business, no headache. They don't have to worry about which movies are coming from where."

It's the same for movies from Hong Kong. Walk into any video store in Toronto or Manhattan, and you'll be faced with racks and racks of the latest from H.K. on DVD. Released by companies like Universe and Mei Ah, these discs are legitimate releases, but without a North American distributor that owns the rights, you can't get them here. The Chinatown store that sold them under the table recently went out of business. Instead, you can pay up to $80 for official releases from San Francisco-based Tai Seng at specialty stores like Boîte Noire.

No end in sight

The Régie has so far done nothing to curry the favour of people in Masan's position. Although there is a special exemption for importing small quantities of videos without a proper distributor, Belleville admits it is rarely granted.

For Masan, getting movies onto shelves is an ongoing fight. "If one movie is released and there is no distributor in Montreal, what would happen? I asked the question to the Régie. I said there are over 100 movies released in the last year with no distributor. They say, Let's wait for someone to become a distributor, otherwise we don't need it in the Quebec region."

In the mean time, Masan is getting his DVDs from Toronto, California and New York. Everywhere, it seems, but India. "If the Régie catches the movie we have to pay the fine, even it's the original DVD."

For his part, Masan would like to see the system done away with, even if it means an end to his comfortable near-monopoly. "In the Indian movie business there are only two distributors," Masan says. "I think if there is no sticker business in Montreal, there will be a double business from now. The shops will have no obligation to buy only from me because if there is no sticker they can buy from anyone they want."