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Federal judge nixes city's copyright suit over government meeting footage in critic's YouTube videos

A federal judge has dismissed a California city’s copyright lawsuit over a critic’s use of Inglewood city council meeting footage in his YouTube videos.

Under California law, government meeting content and other public records can’t be copyrighted, the court said in its Thursday order (PDF) in the Central District of California case. Plus, even if the meeting videos could have been copyrighted, the snippets included by activist Joseph Teixeira in his YouTube videos would have qualified for the fair use exception.

“The videos are fundamentally factual, rather than being creative expression, which makes the fair use case stronger,” writes Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law, in a Volokh Conspiracy blog post published by the Washington Post (reg. req.).

He predicts that the court is likely to order the city to pay Teixeira’s legal fees for defending the copyright case.

Related coverage:

ABAJournal.com: “City files copyright suit over government meeting footage in YouTube videos”