— I'm Timothy Greig. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and work
for AIM Proximity. I'm interested in game design, information architecture, librarianship, and transmedia storytelling. Updates? — Try the RSS.

I should start this post by pointing out that – yes – my partner does work at the OFLC. The views expressed below are my own – as always – not theirs. I’m going on what I remember from past conversations, and my own thoughts, so some of my facts probably need checking.

I love Aro Video and – as an Aro Valley resident myself – regularly borrow films from their store. However, I’m concerned that their recent campaign for censorship reform is cloaking what is primarily an economic challenge for small New Zealand businesses in social/moral rhetoric and emotive language.

Maybe that’s too harsh, I’m sure that is not their intent – but I do think it is interesting to see how economic and social issues collide (jostle for position?) around this issue.

Here’s what I understand, in simple terms:

• Films must display a New Zealand classification to be sold here.
• Films are classified in New Zealand when, before they are supplied to the public, “someone” submits it to the OFLC and pays a fee.
• Most of the time, this “someone” is a big fancy distributor to whom $1100 is not much more than a drop in the bucket. (When you’re looking at millions in Kill Bill sales, $1100 is nothing to get an R18 classification and sticker for your ultra-violent film so that sensible adults can buy it in New Zealand.)
• But big distributors only tend to import and stock what the “mainstream” watch and play. So when it comes to alternative titles – media consumed by smaller groups of the New Zealand population – noone is there to pay this fee.
• Because there are also less people to buy these alternative titles, less units are likely to be sold in New Zealand, meaning that the amount of profit to made from stocking these titles is far less, especially when you take into account that you’ll also have to foot the bill for $1100 to stock it in the first place.
• When you are a small store like Aro Video, and you have built your reputation on being able to find ‘just about anything’ for your customers, this can pose a bit of a problem. If you have to pay a classification fee on top of the cost of importing just one copy of a DVD for a keen customer, you are likely to lose money, not make it. Aro says they provide “a comprehensive choice of contemporary, classic and curious cinema including a significant selection of exclusive titles” – they trade off this reputation.

Now, here is where it starts to get interesting: (more…)