Barry Parr's fight for fair use of public meeting broadcasts got picked up by the San Mateo County Times:

MONTARA — Barry Parr's Web site got hundreds of extra hits when he uploaded a video clip of a tumultuous Half Moon Bay City Council meeting recorded from local cable-access channel MCTV last February. When MCTV told him to take it down, he knew he was in for a fight.

Parr complied, but contested MCTV's claim that the meeting footage they had was proprietary or subject to copyright. He said the meeting tapes were "public documents" that his Web site, Coastsider.com, has a right to republish for free. So far, he has not been able to convince the station's board of directors that he's right."

Barry Parr runs Coastsider, which covers Half Moon Bay. He says:

The public record should be owned by the public.

MCTV performs an important public service. Even after they made us take down our experimental streaming clip, we supported them in their struggle to get their share of franchise fees fromt the county. MCTV’s board and officers are good people who are making bad decisions that are not only against the public interest, but legally suspect.

It’s time for Coastsiders to demand more public service from their public access station. It’s time for Coastsiders to demand the rights to recordings that they are paying for with their tax dollars and fees to government agencies. We own the recordings of these meetings and not MCTV.

Local cable access broadcast of meetings is vital to H2otown, the placeblog I run for Watertown, MA. Like many people who operate a placeblog, it's not a full-time occupation for me. Local access means the difference between covering a meeting and linking to a story about the meeting in the local paper. Short clips of those meetings -- gotten using a video capture device -- are very popular features of the site.

Local access itself is under threat -- several bills currently in Congress would end the current requirements that cable providers contribute to local access, effectively shutting down most local access operations. In an era of shrinking newspapers, losing cable access may limit a community's ability to provide its own coverage if a local paper is no longer able to field a reporter for public meetings.

See Defending Local Access.