Inglewood: The public’s business belongs to us

Hey everyone -- go immediately (well, immediately after you’ve finished reading this) to these YouTube videos of the Inglewood City Council at work!

They show footage and commentary about Inglewood’s mayor at work, and every online hit you deliver will be a nail in the coffin of an absurd argument by people who don’t want you to see government at work.

First among those people is the subject of the videos, the mayor, James T. Butts Jr. His city is spending taxpayer money to go to federal court to get the videos taken down.

How could a city hope to quash online clips of public meetings featuring public officials [mostly the mayor] who are being paid by taxpayers to conduct the public’s business on public property?

These videos critique Butts’ forthrightness and performance as mayor, using public-meeting video, court documents and voice-over commentary. The video-maker and Inglewood gadfly, Joseph Texeira, is obviously not a fan of the mayor, and he spends a lot of energy trying to persuade others to agree with him.

The city’s legal argument is that its videotaped public business isn’t really entirely public; thus, using it online is a copyright violation. Which means that Inglewood is claiming that the same protection extended to creative works like Mickey Mouse, the Google logo and your favorite author also applies to Inglewood’s public meetings.

These are the same meetings that the city’s website notes “may be broadcast on time Warner Channel 35 on Wednesdays and Fridays at 7 p.m.”

In November, Inglewood ordered Texeira to remove the videos, arguing that they have caused “irreparable harm and damages.” This, at a moment when Inglewood is wild to land an NFL team at Hollywood Park, and stands accused of shortcuts to make that happen, like skipping a public vote and adopting a ballot measure about putting in a stadium.

Inglewood’s action looks as if it’s less about copyright and more about public officials objecting to the sometimes unpleasant public scrutiny that comes with the job.

In Los Angeles in a drought, or at the South Pole in the dead of winter, Inglewood is probably on thin ice. UCLA Law School professor Eugene Volokh told The Times that even if copyright applies to Inglewood’s meetings, which he doubts, that could be trumped by fair-use doctrines.

“When you are taking somebody else’s material, not just to reproduce it but to comment on it and criticize it and sometimes parody it … that is generally fair use.”

How, in a larger sense, is the public’s business not in public domain?

I checked CSPAN’s policy and here’s what it says: “Video coverage of the debates originating from the chambers of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate is in the public domain and as such, may be used without restriction or attribution.”

Are Inglewood’s public officials more special than the members of Congress?

By taking this to court, Inglewood runs the risk of creating what it doesn’t want: attention. When I last checked, these videos had no more than a few hundred views each. They’re generally long, unsubtle, a bit repetitive and hardly masterpieces of cinematic art.

But, as I said at the top, you could change all that, and deliver to Inglewood’s powers that be a message they need to hear. Click, click, click!

Follow Patt Morrison on Twitter @pattmlatimes