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Brighton tries to use copyright to censor Councillor

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A friend of mine, Councillor Jason Kitcat, who is also involved in ORG, is being disciplined for posting clips of Brighton & Hove Council meetings to Youtube.

The clips are said to be a “political” use of “Council resources”.

Their documents say Jason attempted to “hold the administration politically to account” by trying “to highlight what the he believed were the administration’s deficiencies”, while using “the council’s intellectual property” and website. Rather than concluding he was doing his job, they say Jason should face being suspended from his post.

The Council claim the web clips are resources which ‘belong’ to the Council. They assert Jason must therefore abide by the Council's code of conduct, which:

“specifically prohibits the use of resources (such as IT equipment) improperly for political purposes, including party political purposes”

These rules are designed to stop unfair use of telephones and offices to campaign for re-election, for instance. The rules are not meant to be applied to matters of free speech, with no impact on council finances, using tools that are freely available to everyone.

Jason has, in copyright law, a fair dealing right to use clips to report news. “Fair dealing” is meant to stop copyright interfering with free speech, by placing a limit on “intellectual property”. Whether Jason’s use of the material is ‘fair dealing’ can only be decided in a Court, ultimately. Meanwhile, of course, just about everyone including Parliament is trying to make sure people can make public use of their recordings of official proceedings.

Unfortunately, in this case Brighton & Hove are simply asserting that the copyright ‘belongs’ to them and therefore falls under their right to regulate Councillor’s use of council property: and in doing so are attempting to create a dangerous precedent.

If Jason is held to have abused council “property”, Councillors will be intimidated from using information to tell residents what is going on. The same information, in words, is reported in minutes and placed in “political” leaflets. Will Brighton Councillors stop such reporting, as the same copyright subsists in Council minutes?

Brighton is full of tech-savvy voters, and many people who are strong believers in human rights and dignity. Will they stand up for freedom of speech and protest against their Council’s attempt to place limits on the rights of their elected representatives? I certainly hope so.

Comments (6)

  1. Mary Kitt-Neel:
    Sep 23, 2010 at 11:37 AM

    Years ago, a small town here in Tennessee had a guy who taped city council meetings, dubbed more, ahem, "interesting" dialog on top of the video, and ran it on a local community access station. Everyone got a real kick out of it for awhile. That was well before the days of YouTube, and he eventually bored of it and stopped.
    I used to cover my local city council for a newspaper and would often take photos at meetings, more as an antidote to extreme boredom than anything else. Had some Photoshop fun with them, but never did more than share with a few friends.
    It does sound as if the Brighton & Hove council is engaging in intimidation. Dunno what the laws are in the UK. I like to think that a similar situation here in the US would provoke a fair amount of indignation, but maybe I'm being idealistic.

  2. Carlo Piana:
    Sep 23, 2010 at 12:37 PM

    Shameful and misguided. Council should know better, this is a clear misuse of copyright, call it censorship. Please stop that.

  3. Stephen Hendry:
    Sep 27, 2010 at 06:08 AM

    I support Mr Kitcat's actions of hosting the clips on Youtube. I think interested members of the public will find Mr Kitcat's clips very informative.
    I have attended Council meetings, most members of the public have not.

    The clips have the capacity to inform a wider audience of what goes on at Council meetings. I suggest Mr Kitcat should be supported rather than sanctioned.

    Yours Stephen Hendry.

  4. Richard Stallman:
    Sep 27, 2010 at 08:48 AM

    Having worked with Jason Kitcat, I'm not surprised that he is taking
    direct action for transparency and accountability in government.

    I don't know what UK copyright law says about this, but I can point
    out a confusing mistake in the discussion: equating copyright with
    "intellectual property". That term lumps copyright together with a
    dozen other totally different laws; if these laws have anything in
    common, it is so abstract as to be irrelevant to understanding any one
    of them. The use of that term is an impediment to understanding any
    real legal issue. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.

  5. Richard Cant:
    Sep 28, 2010 at 08:00 PM

    The only copyright here belongs to Jason (assuming that he made the recordings himself). The council meetings are not literary, musical or artistic works. They don't fall under copyright. That should be the end of it.

  6. Cllr Jason Kitcat:
    Oct 01, 2010 at 05:09 PM

    Thanks for the support everyone. Just for absolute clarity, I did not personally record the footage. The council already records the meetings and puts them on a website which was very difficult to use and didn't provide for direct time links, even when meetings were 4 or more hours. Hence my excerpting of a few sections of interest.

    All the best,
    Jason



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