Blogging and FOIA and public document issue

Blogger allegedly searches and comes up with online copies of city employee pay stubs. Employee salaries are a matter of public record. City tells Google (Blogger.com) to take down the link to the stubs. They did but questions remain.

Parker and Carvalho refused to discuss whether the city argued in its correspondence with Google that the city pay stubs were copyrighted documents.
According to one open-government expert, the documents are not copyrighted.

"It doesn't make any sense," said Terry Francke, general counsel of Californians Aware. "First of all, I doubt that it's a fact that the city copyrights the pay stubs. I don't know why it would.

"And secondly, it's not clear to me that the display of the pay stubs would violate the copyright act anyway. It's simply displaying an image of them, it's not making a copy of them."

Francke added that if the documents are indeed copyrighted, the posting by the blog of the pay stubs would qualify as a "fair use" - meaning it would pass legal muster - because there is no market value lost by the publication.

Source: origin.dailybulletin.com

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