Deerfield-News.com-Deerfield Beach,Fl-In a high tech battle for denying access to something that rightfully belongs to all the citizens. Deerfield Beach or its vendor has made changes in the live feed specifically to deny us access.We still are not sure why as they have not explained why they choose to deny us access to a digital public record?
I do not understand if there is a legal reason for denying the city should have city attorney Andy Maurodis put it in writing and send it to us.We have requested and re-requested that. Then when a reader posted the HTML code to enable the video stream to play we posted it.What is the problem there is no legal reason for denial this is a digital world and digital streams are not exempt from Florida’s broad public records laws.
Again we also rely on the following,that it applies to the city of Deerfield Beach as well as any government body.
From Wikipedia.org
A Work of the United States government, as defined by the United States copyright law, is “a work prepared by an officer or employee” of the federal government “as part of that person’s official duties.” In general, under section 105 of the Copyright Act such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries.
Deerfield Beach this seems to me, not to be an unreasonable request for what you may find to be a strange “Public Records Request”,but it is legitimate.
These cams are in the public domain.
Our pier cam,beach cam, our underwater and their broadcast are not copyright they are public domain and not protected by copyright laws and we have the right to rebroadcast live
We are not exactly sure why the city feels the cameras do not belong to the public and can not be rebroadcast.Our intentions are good to help promote our beaches and allow visitors to our website who may not visit Deerfield-Beach.com to see Deerfield Beach live.