By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN
UN GATE / SDNY COURT, Nov 24 – The trend of the mis-use of copyright law to censor is growing, it is only sometimes opposed.
Inner City Press, facing ouster from the United Nations amid its investigative reports on corruption by the UN and its partners, published a leaked email directed to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric, favoring the ban on Inner City Press. See here.
Then the email's author, the representative to the UN then of Reuters and now of Human Rights Watch, Louis Charbonneau, filed a DCMA complaint with Google and got his leaked email banned from search, as allegedly copyrighted. He wrote: "The copyrighted material is a private email I wrote in April 2012 and for which I never gave permission to be published. It has been published on a blog and appears in on the first page of search results for my name and the firm I work for, Reuters." See here.
Inner City Press raised the issue to a number of non government organizations. HRW, not surprisingly, has not acted on the abuse, or even caused it to be reversed. But nor has the Committee to Protect Journalists, which also continues to glad-hand with SG Guterres even as he keeps Inner City Press banned, now 1339 days.
Now CPJ, without irony, complains about the misuse of copyright as to itself: "New York, November 24, 2021—The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Facebook to restore a video honoring the winners of the International Press Freedom Awards (IPFA) at CPJ’s annual awards ceremony held on November 18 and streamed on social media during the event. Less than an hour after the stream ended, Facebook notified CPJ that the video had been withheld worldwide because of a copyright match to a 13-second clip owned by i-Cable News... i-Cable, signed an agreement in 2018 with China Mobile Limited, a state-owned telecommunication company, allowing China Mobile to use its content for the next 20 years. “It is beyond ironic that a platform which trumpets its commitment to freedom of speech should block a video celebrating journalists who risk their lives and liberty defending it,” CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said. “Facebook must restore the video immediately and provide a clear and timely explanation of why it was censored in the first place.'"
But what about the partners' misuse of copyright to ban from search a leaked email about and reflecting UN censorship? What about the UN's ongoing ban on Inner City Press? Crickets. The press release concludes, "CPJ has documented examples of U.S. copyright laws being used to censor journalism globally." Yeah.
A request for Inner City Press' re-entry was filed by the law firm Quinn Emanuel, see here. Watch this site. And as to China (and UN), see Belt and Roadkill, here.
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