The video contains snippets of footage from Inglewood City Council meetings.
Joseph Teixeira is the man behind the video. He became involved in 2011 after local police failed investigate a drive-by shooting which he witnessed.
He took his concerns before the city council and filed a Public Records Act request to get the recordings of his 911 calls. Teixeira claims that the police chief denied their existed, but he would get the tapes some nine months later.
After being stonewalled in the council chambers, Teixeira turned his attention to exposing any potential misinformation being spread there via YouTube. He said, "If I take these tapes, and I compare them to what they're saying in the video of the meetings, it would be clear that they are blatantly lying."
Teixeira got a cease-and-desist letter last November and still refused to take the videos down. The city filed suit in March and is seeking unspecified "actual damages stemming from the defendant's unauthorized exploitation of the city's copyrighted videos."
Concerning the case itself, Inglewood’s case might not even get off the ground. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at nearby UCLA Law School, dropped these bits of knowledge for the uninformed. California public records law governments generally cannot claim ownership of public documents, in this case the city council videos. And one step further, if Inglewood could copyright its meeting videos, fair-use law grants broad rights to use copyrighted material without permission. Teixiera cites Fair-Use on his channel.
Dan Laidman, the attorney representing Teixeira pro bono, argued to dismiss the case in June.
CityNews will track this story as it develops further.
For further reading on Inglewood’s copyright lawsuit, see here.
Teixiera’s YouTube channel can be found here.
Image Credit: Flickr User thomashawk, https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/5837998056/ via (CC BY-NC 2.0)