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Australian Gov’t: Not In The Public Interest For The Public To Be Interested In Secret Anti-Piracy Negotiations (Techdirt)

Last month Techdirt wrote about yet more secret meetings between the copyright
and internet industries, this time in Australia, where the federal government
there was “encouraging” them to come up with ways of tackling online copyright
infringement.

The public, as usual, was not invited to offer their views on plans that would
obviously affect them more than anyone. And so people filed a freedom of
information (FOI) request to find out belatedly what was going on. But the
answers they received were unsatisfactory, to say the least: _

> the Attorney-General’s Department responded to that Freedom of Information
request, providing a series of five documents. However, using a variety of
justifications, the department has redacted almost all of the information
previously contained in the documents — including 14 pages of notes taken by
a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a
senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department.

_ Some of the excuses for not providing the requested information are pretty
far-fetched: _

> the Attorney-General’s Department stated in its response to Delimiter’s FoI
request that it “does not hold” a list of the attendees who actually attended
the meeting.

_ …

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