A privacy organization that warned of a plan in California to claim a copyright on everything produced by the government, from films of city council meetings to logos and legislation, says the threat has been removed through amendments to the legislation.
The once-controversial bill now proposes a better tracking of state patents, trademarks and copyrights with a requirement that agencies “consider” the intellectual property rights of others when they write contracts, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The objective, the group said, is to “help avoid situations like the ongoing trademark dispute over hotels and campgrounds in Yosemite National Park, without harming public access to government records and data.”
WND reported when the foundation set off alarms about the legislation.
EFF legislative counsel Ernesto Falcon explained at the time that the California Assembly Committee on Judiciary had approved AB 2880 “to grant local and state governments’ copyright authority along with other intellectual property rights.”
The state’s current model is similar to the federal government’s: With a few exceptions the audio, visual and written work of government employees is available to the public to use.
Ernesto said that at its core, the bill would have granted “state and local government the authority to create, hold, and exert copyrights, including materials created by the government.”
He said, “Such a broad grant of copyright authority to state and local governments will chill speech, stifle open government, and harm the public domain.”
EFF said the bill would have clarified that works created by public entities are eligible for intellectual property restrictions.
“This includes trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. As things stand today, works created by California state and local governments (like reports, video, maps, and so on) aren’t subject to copyright except in a few special cases. That ensures that Californians who funded the creation of those works through their tax dollars can use those works freely.”
But EFF said the bill would have changed California “from having one of the best policies on copyright of any U.S. state to among the worst.”
“It authorizes public entities to register copyrights in their work. That means that state and local governments will have the power to seek statutory damages that can reach as high as $30,000 per infringement and potentially as life altering as $150,000 for willful conduct against people who use state-created materials,” Ernesto said.
In a new statement, EFF said it was “never made clear why the state needed sweeping new copyright and trademark powers and new limitations on open government.”
But it said it was dropping its opposition to the plan based on new changes in the state Senate that removed “the dangerous sections that EFF and over 25 other organizations opposed.”
“Thank you to everyone who weighed in on this issue for sending a strong message that the abuse of intellectual property laws can harm many different sectors of society, and that preventing those abuses needs to be a top priority for our lawmakers,” the group said.
“The power to assert copyrights and trademarks over taxpayer-funded work is one that’s easily abused to punish critics of the government or to charge more fees to the public,” it said.
EFF reported the public could have been threatened with damages as high as $30,000 “per infringement” for using state-created materials.
“Imagine local officials having the power to issue a … takedown notice of YouTube videos of city council meetings simply because they did not like them,” EFF warned.
“California local and state governments are not exempt from the temptation of suppressing disfavored speech under a copyright claim as evidenced by the Teixeira case. In 2015, the city council of Inglewood had filed a lawsuit against a citizen (Teixeira) for uploading video clips of city council meetings to YouTube with his criticisms of the mayor. The lawsuit was dismissed by the court outright because California cities don’t have the power to claim copyright. The court went even further to explain how Mr. Teixeira’s use of the videos to criticize the mayor was a fair use. So while the litigation ended on the correct note (though it cost Inglewood taxpayers $110,000 in legal fees), it demonstrated how copyright law can be abused in the hands of government,” EFF said.
The California Newspaper Publishers Association also had raised objections to the plan, as did the California Chamber of Commerce and a many Internet companies.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/california-backs-off-claim-to-copyright-everything/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/california-backs-off-claim-to-copyright-everything/
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