| As CPJ
Complains of Censorship on Facebook Silent
on DCMA Abuse and UN Press Ban
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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