So Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, whose memoir Murder in Samarkand was finally published last week after spending months in legal limbo following claims from the UK government that they damaged the national interest, has attracted fresh legal trouble in the form of copyright takedown notice from none other than the FCO.
Murray alleges that the UK was complicit in the torture of suspected al-Qaida operatives in Uzbekistan, and he’s got the documents to prove it. After the FCO suppressed the publishing of these documents in the memoir, Murray obtained a second set of copies through the Freedom of Information Act (guess it helps when you know where to look) and published them on his website (available here), whereupon the FCO sent him a takedown notice (pdf), compaining the docs were subject to Crown Copyright.
So either the Queen was planning to make a tidy profit later down the line by exposing her good servants’ misdeeds, or this is a classic case of copyright law used directly to suppress free speech, a la Diebold/Swarthmore. But the funny thing is, although the more political UK blogs are picking up the story (cf Blairwatch, the FOIA blog) the international open access/free culture blogs are too busy worrying about the latest moves by the BPI to target UK filesharers to take advantage of this golden opportunity to stop sounding like the music industry took their toys away and get political, despite the fact it’s broken in the UK press.
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Pingback on Jul 18th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
[…] My fortnightly column for openDemocracy has just gone live, an extension of this post of last week: “It is nearly two decades since the British government tried to ban Spycatcher, and you would expect them to have learned their lesson. After throwing £2 million in legal expenses after the biography of former MI5 operative Peter Wright, her majesty’s government was forced to admit defeat in October 1988, leaving ministers red-faced and Wright seriously in the black, thanks to the free publicity afforded his book by his repeated trips to courts across the globe. Eighteen years on, it’s the turn of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to have a go. But this time they have a new weapon in their armoury – the vagaries of the British copyright system.” […]
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Oct 25th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
David Shayler, whislteblower on MI6’s shady and illegal operations suffered a more insidious de facto censorship than either Wright or Murray. Publication of his insights were held up for a year while they were vetted, but subsequently no major bookseller would stock the heavily blacked out final text. With the majority of booksales now in the hands of a few multinational companies, the gurus of the free market have been proved right again: there is nothing which can’t be privatised- even the job of suppressing free speech.