Video: MWSD considers webcasting, copyright issues

The recordings of public meetings should either have the copyright reside with the government agency or an unrestricted license be granted to copy and reuse either for private or commercial use.  Fair use is not sufficient.  Most of the local political debate is now hosted on commercial sites.  If MCTV thinks they need a copyrighted recording of a public meeting to sell to defray their costs, let them convince the Board of Supervisors(BOS) to appropriate the fees tacked onto the bills of Comcast customers to MCTV to accomplish this.  The transfer of those costs to the taxpayers served by the local special districts in not appropriate.

I commend the MWSD Board for aggressively looking at these proposals and protecting the publics interest.

In comparing the attitude of MWSD to CFPD Boards toward copyrights, in my opinion the CFPD Board is not as far a long in the process as MWSD.  MWSD has been using MCTV. The MWSD Board also felt that web casting was important enough to do part of this task themselves and host it with the help of MontaraFog, until they can get a more permanent web casting solution.  Citizens have been prodding CFPD and its predecessors HMBFPD and PMFPD Boards to broadcast their meeting for years.  Unfortunately, MCTV was not in a position to have a person available to video tape or a broadcast time slot for the Fire Board meetings(curiously, now there is).  The CFPD Board is now engaged in the controversy and lawsuit over CalFire and the staffing issues. The web casting and sub issue of who controls the copyright is a low priority for CFPD Board.  I suspect the CFPD Board was surprised by the number of people that showed up to speak on the issue and the fervor of the discussion.

I have some observations on producing the audio of the CFPD Board meetings and writing up the “editorial” annotation for MontaraFog.  I felt myself in conflict between a dry non engaging “just the facts” annotation that would bore readers and a slightly more opinionated one pointing to what I felt the public would consider to be the important parts of the meeting.  Previously, I had done notes for MidcoastL and had a similar issues.  To be truly objective results in equal weighting to all aspects of the meeting that makes for a very boring reading that most likely no one would read.  For me the problem of governance on the Coastside is the general disengagement of the public.  Is the greater good engaging the public or providing a dry objective record that is warehoused?

It has been said, the pen is mightier then the sword.  But, people can turn anything into a weapon. For those editing sound, operating cameras or editing audio and video, there are ways of injecting bias into recording and editing process that is very difficult for the viewer to detect.  Examples are as simple as adjusting the volume for a particular speaker to make them sound more strident or to make them appear to be insecure about what they are saying.  A camera operator can focus in or out, frame or not frame a speaker, pan away from a speaker, focus on a bored or sleeping Board member, do a low profile shot of a public speaker or a high shot to make them look pleading.  We have all seen the TV media do a biased interview or expose’.  To suggest that MCTV has no bias or trains their staff to have no bias or could not have bias in the future is self serving nonsense.  To think that the FCC, IRS or our BOS can charter MCTV to be totally objective is similarly ridiculous.  Observing and recording any human activity perturbs what is being observed and recorded.  For me personally, I’d rather have an operator with bias, than a dry static camera planted in the back of the room.  Over time, any bias will become apparent. Again, my sense is right now, the community needs engagement, not a dry presentation.

The fact that there is now competition for these contracts for service, empowers the Boards to select the best option for the public.  The Boards should be able to negotiate for what they think is in the public interest.  In addition, in the future, if there is an issue with a contractor’s performance , it will be a simple matter to switch contractors.

I ran across an interesting editorial in the L.A. Times regarding copyright:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-healey18feb18,0,5092348.story

At the end it refers to Article I of the Constitution.  I located the relevant part:  Section 8 “Patents and Copyrights”—To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; (Apparently when Congress extended copyright to the author’s lifetime + 50 years and allowed heirs to renew it, they as usual forgot to check the Constitution first.)

I fail to see how MCTV claiming copyright to a government meeting that they were paid to record comes anywhere near the copyright purpose as set out in Article I section 8 of the Constitution.

The L.A. Times editorial’s closing sentence begins “Achieving that goal means balancing the interests of content creators against the public’s,”.  It seems that nearly everyone not associated with MCTV can see that the public’s interest outweighs MCTV’s in the situation under discussion.

Leonard,

You need to know that the L.A. Times, and almost all of the rest of the increasingly narrow megacorporation-owned media in this country, is two-faced on copyright matters. They want their own copyrights to be inviolable and last forever, but they want the copyrights on outside material they wish to nab and use freely to be flimsy and easily overridden. The latter is merely a way to reduce the cost of content and thus increase profits in the corporate media mind. Understanding that is important to understanding what is behind the sentence on balancing interests that you quoted.

All of us little creative content purveyors--creators and their representatives--battle this crap and negative trend on a daily basis. There are thousands, if not millions, of times as many of us depending on copyright as there are media corporations playing a copyright game with their paid politicians.

Like so many parts of the Constitution, which was written largely for white male landowners and others who wished to obtain better financing in a young and suspect (to the financiers of the time) America, the language on copyright could not possibly have anticipated the modern scene, especially the technology that has made it so easy to steal another’s work--which is the same thing as saying to steal another’s intellectual property.

Carl May