A court case attempting to thwart animal activists from sharing covertly recorded acts of alleged animal cruelty has profound and grave consequences for press freedom, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom’s Peter Greste has warned.
The high court is now considering a landmark battle over the use of video footage collected by the Farm Transparency Project, a group of activists known for breaking into abattoirs and installing covert cameras.
In 2023, Farm Transparency Project broke into a slaughterhouse owned by the Game Meats Company in Eurobin, Victoria, and collected footage it alleged showed animal cruelty.
The activists shared the footage with the regulator, the federal department of agriculture. When it received no proper response from the department, it published some of the footage on its website and gave it to a local Channel Seven news journalist.
The abattoir has since argued that it owns the copyright to the footage, not the activists, and so any possession or sharing of the footage by Farm Transparency Project must be permanently prohibited.
The full bench of the federal court accepted that argument – the first time such a finding has ever been made in Australian law – conflicting with the general position that copyright belongs to the maker of the film.
That finding has significant implications for the media’s broader use of covertly recorded footage collected in a similar fashion, even if it exposes wrongdoing.
Guardian Australia can reveal that the concerns about the ruling are so significant that the Human Rights Law Centre and the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom have intervened in the high court proceedings, arguing they should be heard before the court makes its judgment.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailGreste, the executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, said in a statement that the case had “significant press freedom implications”.
“It risks giving those who want wrongdoing covered up additional legal ammunition to shutdown public interest journalism,” he said.
“The ruling was unprecedented and marks a significant, troubling development in Australian law. That is why we have sought leave to assist the high court with our public interest perspective on these issues.”
The Human Rights Law Centre’s whistleblower project associate legal director, Kieran Pender, said the case could give wrongdoers “another tool to hide corruption”.
“Sometimes whistleblowers and journalists, inadvertently or intentionally, might act in ways that leave them open to allegations of unlawfulness or impropriety to raise concerns in the public interest,” he said.
“The law should not permit perpetrators of wrongdoing to use copyright law and equity to keep evidence of wrongdoing hidden and prevent third parties reporting on it.”
The footage has been suppressed in previous court proceedings. It had been forwarded to the federal department on 3 May, before being sent to 7News Border, which prepared to broadcast an extract on 17 May before the Game Meats Company served temporary injunctions, preventing publication.
Karl Texler, a Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry veterinarian who works on-site at the abattoir to ensure animal welfare, told the federal court that the footage “does not substantially demonstrate animal cruelty”.
Solicitor David Henderson, acting for the Game Meats Company, said the abattoir disagreed with the characterisation of the case made by the Human Rights Law Centre and Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.
“This case does not address the conduct of whistleblowers, journalists, police or any regulatory body,” he said. “Game Meats’ initial action was brought in response to a series of illegal break-ins and entries to its secured, private property, committed by trespassers … and Farm Transparency’s entitlement to use and benefit from the fruits of its illegal conduct.”
Henderson noted that the Game Meats Company had not been found to have engaged in wrongdoing by any regulator or court.
In their submissions to the high court, the abattoir’s lawyers argued the repeated trespass on to the property infringed its fundamental right to “exclusive possession of its premises, and in particular its right to exclude others from viewing or exposing what occurred therein”.
“By its trespass, and by its surreptitiously placed cameras, Farm Transparency obtained the one thing the law of trespass most directly prevented it from obtaining: access to, and being able to see and then publicise to the world at large, what goes on in the private and heavily secured premises of Game Meats, which it was not otherwise authorised or able to see,” they argued.
“For so long as Farm Transparency retains, and intends to publish, the unlawfully captured images, the injurious consequences of its trespass against Game Meats will continue.”
