An injunction filed by state-run Radio-Canada has successfully removed an “educational” series aimed at children and imitating the cult children’s show Bobino from the websites of anti-health measures, federal court documents show.
Babino, a program “without a trap, without a hidden message” in which “there is no mention of the health crisis” and which mistakenly resembles the children’s program broadcast by the SRK until the 1980s, will ultimately have had only 6 of the 20 planned episodes. The series was taken off the internet in June following legal action by the public broadcaster.
The estate of Guy Sanche, the author who created the Bobino series in 1956, joined the lawsuit filed by Radio-Canada on May 17 to shut down the Internet broadcast of this “fake” series. This was produced by André (“Stu Pitt”) Pitre and his company Lux Media. The character of Babino was embodied by his collaborator Yanick (“Yandel artist”) Décarie.
The two men are on the list of 45 Quebec “conspiracy leaders” identified in a recent report by the UNESCO Chair on the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism. Their ideological affiliations have been described as “far right” and “anti-government”.
The creators of Babino tried to raise at least $6,000 on the GoFundMe platform to produce 20 episodes of the series; They had also reserved the domain name Babino.ca which is now offline. At least six videos were released, the court documents said. The lawsuit demanded that they be removed from various platforms, including alternative video streaming sites.
Radio-Canada claims that this series plagiarized the sets, script processes, costumes, characters, puppets, and opening and closing credits, and “restored elements of the SRC’s intellectual property in whole or in a significant degree”. The musical signature would have been adopted; the names of the original characters Bobino and Bobinette, rerouted to “Babino” and “Bobépine”.
The authors would have done so without the consent of the copyright holders, which is a violation of the law.
conspiracy project
At the launch of their series, André Pitre and Yanick Décarie denounced a shift in current youth programs “to indoctrinate audiences with ‘globalist’ and ‘communist’ messages”.
“As a parent, I don’t want them putting LGBT messages on my youth show. Messages [à l’effet que le téléspectateur n’est] maybe not a little guy,” said André Pitre in a video that is still online. “We will not try to get our messages across,” he promises.
After the two men were first reported by Radio-Canada in April, they publicly accused the public broadcaster of “corrupting children,” the lawsuit says.
“We need to take back control of the content of what we consume [comme] television programs, in particular for children. Subsidized media produce programs that are careful to program our youth or even manipulate them at will,” the fundraiser’s description reads.
end of the procedure
Their project ended abruptly after they were made aware of the legal action taken against them, including through a notification that the court had agreed to privately message them on Facebook.
In a letter received by the court on June 1, the defendants stated “that they do not intend to proceed with the lawsuit and have decided to honor the plaintiff’s claims in this case.” On July 7, Radio-Canada dropped the case.
“Radio-Canada places the utmost importance on respecting intellectual property. We are therefore completely satisfied with the conclusion of this case and the cooperation of the defendants,” Crown Group spokesman Marc Pichette said in an email on Thursday.
André Pitre and Yanick Décarie had not answered questions from Le Devoir when these lines were written.
The original Bobino series aired on public radio from 1957 to 1985, with morning repeats until 1989. The original series is described by the lawsuit as a “cult series.” [qui] still belongs to the cultural heritage of those beautiful years”.
With Annabelle Caillou