Fair Play: Remuneration, Intellectual Property Management and Accessibility in the Independent Media Arts Sector Today

Fair Play is a research and knowledge-sharing project conducted at the University of Toronto with the Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA), between March 2022 and March 2023. Developed in the wake of IMAA’s Online Presentation Standards (OPS) project, Fair Play was originally set up to help shift the culture sector (including independent media artists, distributors, exhibitors, and related stakeholders) towards an urgently-needed new consensus about current remuneration, intellectual property management, and accessibility issues embedded in the online use of independent artists’ and creative-rights holders’ content. Over the twelve-month activation period, Fair Play has circulated, sought feedback on, and otherwise operationalized a new national remuneration fee schedule, toolkits and protocols for online media arts presentations previously developed by the IMAA. The Fair Play team included Principal Investigator MaryElizabeth Luka (University of Toronto), and researchers Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte (Simon Fraser University), Claudia Sicondolfo (York University, University of Toronto) and Darsana Vijay (University of Toronto).

The project also involved the leadership team at IMAA, initially including National Directors Emmanuel Madan (2022) and Barbora Racevičiūtė (2022-23), as well as Project Manager Benjamin J. Allard, and directors of several of IMAA’s member organizations in an advisory capacity (see Team, below). The project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with additional resource contributions from IMAA, the Critical Digital Methods Institute at University of Toronto Scarborough, and from the Knowledge Media Design Institute at University of Toronto.