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Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Los Angeles County Newsletter Illegally Reprinted News Articles

Matt Hamilton |
April 28, 2014 | 3:26 p.m. PDT

Staff Reporter

A public relations newsletter for Los Angeles County violated copyright laws by publishing whole articles from leading news agencies, including the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, without licenses or permission, legal experts say.

The bi-monthly newsletter, Workplace Connection, has a masthead with an editor-in-chief and staff writers — all county employees — but lifted at least 20 articles and photographs by professional journalists since 2012.

The Office of Workplace Programs, a unit of the county’s Chief Executive Office, produces the taxpayer-funded newsletter and distributes more than 40,000 copies to county employees. The newsletter is posted on the county’s website (but links to the newsletters have since been removed).

David Sommers, public affairs director of the L.A. County Chief Executive Office, said an investigation began “immediately” after Neon Tommy raised concerns over copyright violations.

“Our investigation is still underway, including working backwards through archived editions of the newsletter to identify, to the fullest extent possible, the impacted publications and reporters,” Sommers said. “Once complete, we intend to provide appropriate notification and apology to the publications.”

If news organizations pursue legal action, the copyright violations could tangle the county in litigation – a costly prospect since copyright laws are vague when it comes to infringement by government agencies.

The copy-and-paste scheme appears to have begun in the May-June 2012 edition that featured a story on free bus fare for children in the foster care system. That article has the same headline and text as a story in the Los Angeles Daily News by reporter Christina Villacorte. The county newsletter made no mention of Villacorte or her newspaper. 

Eight of the next 11 editions of the newsletter included articles from the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, NBC News, Associated Press, StreetsBlog San Francisco, CityWatch, and Intersections, a South L.A. website produced by students at the University of Southern California.

“That is a violation of copyright in every instance,” said Jonathan Kotler, a trial attorney and professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. The regular publication of professionally produced, copyrighted content exposes the county – and the taxpayers – to legal action, Kotler said. “These folks are heading for trouble. The fact that it's the government doing it as opposed to a for-profit publication really doesn't help them much."

Unlike aggregation — where originally reported journalism is rewritten, condensed and published online, typically with a link and citation to the original source — the county newsletter regularly lifted journalistic work and published it in full.

Lifted content ranged from the promotional, such as the Los Angeles Times’ April 10, 2013, article on a theater series named after Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky (reprinted here), to international hard news, such as Reuters’ dispatch from Oct. 21, 2013, on a smog emergency in China (reprinted here).

A public records request filed by Neon Tommy for all contracts and licensing agreements between the Chief Executive Office and news agencies and digital content libraries from the last five years returned nothing suggesting the county had permission to lift the content.

The documents turned over to Neon Tommy show the county spent more than $75,000 since 2012 on marketing and public relations monitoring software. And last August, the county signed a $6,000, two-year agreement with Getty Images for licensed images.

M. Loreto Maldonado, who said she became the director of Workplace Programs last February, launched an internal investigation in late March on the same day Neon Tommy confronted her about the recurring copyright violations. Maldonado, the newsletter’s current editor-in-chief, declined further comment. The newsletter’s former editor-in-chief and current staff writer, Eddie Washington, and another staff writer, Juan Arredondo, also declined to comment.

In the most recent edition, March-April 2014, four of the 10 articles are lifted directly from professional publications or news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times. 

What legal recourse news organizations have is subject to debate, several lawyers told Neon Tommy. 

The county and staffers could face lawsuits from each news organization and injunctions barring publication of copyrighted works without proper licenses. 

Statutory damages could top $150,000 per instance — and actual damages could push that number higher. The county could also be forced to pay each news organization’s legal fees.

Whether those lawsuits hold weight in court is up in the air. On paper, the state can be sued for copyright infringement. But courts have granted immunity to the state and state employees, said Jonathan Pink, a partner at Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith. Pink successfully defended the California State University System in 2008 after a professor at San Diego State University was sued for copyright infringement, but Pink said the law is unclear if the county also enjoys state immunity.  

“Whether a county is a state actor or an agent of the state is something that has to be litigated,” Pink said.

The newsletter’s sloppy practices come as county officials are increasingly developing more advanced, in-house media to promote county events and achievements. 

On Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s website, which resembles a local news site with original articles penned by staffers, he laments the Internet’s harm to quality journalism. Local news, wrote Yaroslavsky, “is simply too spare to provide a true understanding of the breadth of issues that confront us or of the people who take to heart their role as public servants.”

Supervisor Yaroslavsky’s spokesman, Joel Bellman, declined to comment on the copyright violations in the Workplace Connection newsletter.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ Chief Deputy, Nedra Jenkins, said hearing of an “allegation of plagiarism” is “very disappointing.” 

"It's never acceptable to take someone else's work and represent it as your own,” Jenkins said.

Reach Staff Reporter Matt Hamilton here. Follow him on Twitter here.



 

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