{"id":182512,"date":"2015-08-25T19:47:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T00:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/25\/today-in-ip-insanity-2\/"},"modified":"2015-08-25T19:47:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T00:47:00","slug":"today-in-ip-insanity-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/25\/today-in-ip-insanity-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in IP Insanity"},"content":{"rendered":"
The city of Inglewood, California attempted to use copyright to prevent people from posting videos of their city council meetings.<\/div>\n

Thankfully, thee judge called bullsh%$ on the town’s arguments<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Joseph Teixeira doesn’t like Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts, so he makes Youtube videos<\/a> featuring City Council meeting footage. <\/p>\n

The Mayor and Council decided to silence their critic by paying to register the videos of their city meetings with the US Copyright Office, then spending $50,000 in taxpayer money to retain a lawyer to sue Teixeira for copyright infringement. <\/p>\n

The court was unimpressed with Inglewood’s leaders: it ruled that the council meetings weren’t copyrightable; that councils can’t make money from public records; and that the videos — in the event that they used anything copyrighted — were fair use. Now they face the possibility that Teixeira will recover fees for his pro bono counsel — more tax dollars flushed away in an illegal bid to prevent a critic from speaking. <\/p>\n

Then there’s the Streisand Effect: in bringing this action, the City of Inglewood increased traffic to Teixeira’s videos by five hundred percent<\/i>. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis original<\/i>)<\/p>\n

It’s nice that the judge slapped them down firmly.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, IP is used to censor criticism and to privatize the public space, and it is a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The city of Inglewood, California attempted to use copyright to prevent people from posting videos of their city council meetings. Thankfully, thee judge called bullsh%$ on the town’s arguments: Joseph Teixeira doesn’t like Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts, so he makes Youtube videos featuring City Council meeting footage. The Mayor and Council decided to silence …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1194,971,1134,1109,978,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-civil-rights","category-copyright","category-ip","category-politics","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}