NYPD denies records of copyright communications it had previously acknowledged

22 Feb 2016

A few media outlets reported last summer that the NYPD, in its continuing efforts to crack down on the sometimes-annoying costumed characters in Times Square, had asked Disney and Marvel to initiate copyright action there. Disney and Marvel didn’t bite. I requested the communications (or records thereof) under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, and got told — months later — there were no such records. Strange.

I wrote the whole thing up for Techdirt this week:

Unfortunately, the nature of frustrated transparency efforts is that we don’t really have the answers. If the NYPD had promptly responded that it had no such records or would be withholding them according to a particular exemption, or even if it had given me a limited set, we could close this case. As it stands, we don’t really know anything more about the NYPD’s bizarre efforts to jam its “quality-of-life” issues into an ill-fitting copyright enforcement box.