A brief note on Crown (and other) Copyright and the Freedom of Information Act. Ex-diplomat Craig Murray has been forced to remove from his website a set of official documents related to the events he writes about in his book Murder in Samarkand by government threats to sue. The documents were, apparently, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and (in the case of those which were about Craig himself) the Data Protection Act.
Copyright protection is a general problem with the Freedom of Information Act. The Act gives you the right to request information, but it does not in general give you the right to do any acts restricted by copyright in respect of the information you've got -- for instance, to copy or republish the information. In Craig Murray's case, the government are seeking to prevent publication of the documents, either on the web or in his book; this makes it hard for him to refer to them in making his case.
Now, this hasn't been tested in court yet, and Craig Murray, who unlike the Treasury Solicitors doesn't have a £400 billion per year revenue stream to support his litigation, isn't about to test it. It's possible that the courts would decide that there is a public interest argument for allowing distribution of the documents (and it's interesting that the government has not risked an Official Secrets Act prosecution in his case), but I wouldn't rely on that.
However, to a great extent this doesn't matter. If one person can get hold of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, then so can anybody else, simply by making a request to the relevant public authority. Rather than trying to face down the FCO and its lawyers, a better response would be to draft a fill-in-the-blanks Freedom of Information Request, which anybody could email in to the FCO to get their own copy of the key documents perfectly legally. That's certainly less convenient than simply downloading them off the web -- in particular, most government departments make sure they send responses no earlier than the maximum twenty working days permitted under the Act -- but there's a limit to what the government can do to wriggle out of its obligations. If Craig can provide information identifying each document to be used in such a request, I'll happily build him a website which will allow anybody to send in such a request at the click of a button.
(This doesn't, of course, cover the documents obtained under the Data Protection Act, which creates only a right to see information about yourself. I don't know which of the Murray documents he got under which Act, so I don't know whether this cripples the above suggestion.)
Comments
Posted by Andrew Gray, Thursday, 13 July 2006 12:19 (link):
Leaving aside the DPA-sourced stuff, there's another thing that could scupper you. As far as I am aware, should a government department - in its rush to ensure that all FOI requests are fully and helpfully complied with, of course - accidentally release material it shouldn't, it isn't automatically required to release the information again under the mistaken reasoning used the first time.
In practice, the department would probably say "screw it, it's out there", but if they wanted to play silly buggers, it doesn't take a great deal of ingenuity to claim that releasing it at all was a mistake and it should have been exempt under s.27 (damages foreign relations), or s.36 (prejudice to conduct of public affairs), etc.
They could also, I guess, claim that further release and dissemination of this information falls under s.27 or s.30 (it's "has at any time" been held on file by the FCO with a view to future prosecution)... but I have no idea how sound that reasoning is.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 14 July 2006 00:11 (link):
All fair points, potentially, but we won't know until we've tried to request the stuff....
Posted by memals, Tuesday, 25 July 2006 11:32 (link):
The reason you can not dissemenate FOI obtained information is simply the goverment can not track its readership.
If on the other hand, everytime anyone wants specific data that is in the FOI sphere then the goverment takes their name and adds it to the "no fly list" (grin)
Posted by Andrew Watson, Wednesday, 23 August 2006 08:49 (link):
Plenty of double standards here. ISTR a decision a few months ago by the Lord Chancellor that FOI responses requested by a newspaper would be published on the 'net at the same time as being sent to that newspaper. The motivation was apparently to ensure that the requesting newspaper would not be able to get an exclusive story from the FOI response, and hence to help discourage newspapers using FOI in the first place.
(Sorry, I don't have any references to the detail of this story - all based on a vague memory. ISTR that The Guardian attempted to appeal against this decision, wanting the FOI requester to be sent the response ahead of its general publication.)
Anyway, the gist of my point is; it seems that government is prepared try both restricting the circulation of FOI responses, and conversely to circulate them as widely as possible, depending on which will most frustrate the purpose of the Act.
Posted by Dan O'Huiginn, Thursday, 7 September 2006 19:19 (link):
Aren't government departments entitled to charge a processing fee whenever they release a document? While lots of people would be willing to fill out a web form, I imagine a lot fewer would be willing to cough up £20 to have a document that's already semi-public sent to them.
Posted by tk, Monday, 18 September 2006 01:35 (link):
How about a form that asks Craig Murray to email you the documents?
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