News

In a blow to animal rights activists and press freedom, the Federal Court has granted the copyright of footage taken at a Victorian slaughterhouse to the meat processor itself. By Katherine Wilson.

The abattoir using copyright law against activists

Chris Delforce, of Farm Transparency Project, being arrested at a slaughterhouse in 2023.

Credit: FTP

Chris Delforce accepts his films may one day land him in jail.

His footage has generated public inquiries, government taskforces and law reform. In the past fortnight, the Melbourne filmmaker has endured legal threats from a meat processor and, early on the morning of Tuesday, August 12, police raided his Southbank home, seeking footage of 20 piggeries across Victoria.

Five officers “seized my phone and computers”, Delforce says. “It’s violating when people come into your home and treat you like a criminal. It makes you feel unsafe – you fear a knock at the door.”

He says the cruelty captured in the footage “is apparently of far less concern than the people who expose it. Police should not be acting as the private mercenaries of the pig slaughter industry.”

More shocking news hit the following day, when a Federal Court order stripped him of copyright of another film, awarding it to a slaughterhouse, Game Meats Company (GMC) in Eurobin, in Victoria’s north-east. The court also ordered that his copies of the film be destroyed.

This sets “a wide-reaching legal precedent which will affect press freedoms and the rights of whistleblowers”, says Delforce.

The suppressed footage was shot over several nights last year, when Delforce and his colleague Harley McDonald-Eckersall crawled under GMC’s cyclone fence and trespassed to hide pin cameras in kill-floor ceilings. Together, they run Farm Transparency Project (FTP), an animal protection charity established following Dominion, Delforce’s award-winning 2018 documentary that hid cameras around Australia’s abattoirs, racetracks and factory farms.

Now a collective of investigators, FTP has since generated media exposés in major news outlets on live sheep exports, live baiting, pig gassing and slaughterhouse cruelty.

Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie believes the ruling shows “legislative reform is urgently needed”. He calls for a public interest test to “ensure that evidence of alleged egregious behaviour, including video footage of animal mistreatment obtained illegally, does not automatically become the property of the alleged wrongdoer”.

Victorian Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell described the now-suppressed footage under parliamentary privilege last August, saying it shows goats conscious “after having their throats cut and hooves removed, including blinking, lifting their heads and vocalising” and “newborn goats being left in a plastic bucket for hours without food or water” and “being painfully electrocuted multiple times, including one who is captured crying out in pain for over two hours after an unsuccessful stunning attempt left them partially paralysed”.

Court documents show FTP submitted an extract of the footage with a complaint to the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. DAFF did not respond beyond an automated email receipt, but it forwarded the complaint to the slaughterhouse. FTP then sent an extract to Channel Seven, but as 7NEWS Border prepared to broadcast, the slaughterhouse served a legal notice, and Seven decided against publishing.

In a Federal Court test case, GMC sued FTP for trespass, copyright breach, injurious falsehood and misleading and deceptive conduct. Justice John Snaden ordered penalties of $130,000 for trespass but dismissed the other claims. On appeal, a full bench of the Federal Court has now reassigned copyright and ordered FTP to destroy the film and reveal a list of news outlets to which it was distributed.

The order has “a chilling effect” on covert investigations, which are often “the only way to get the evidence needed for an investigative story”, says Johan Lidberg, an associate professor of journalism at Monash University who specialises in freedom of information. It prevents publication “that appears to be in the highest public interest”, he said, as indicated by the unusual step in using copyright to stop it.

The ruling is so novel that the Australian Copyright Council was unable to comment, advising that it appears to rely on laws of trusts rather than copyright. It also relies on an obiter dictum – an incidental remark in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v Lenah Game Meats, a 2001 High Court case won by the ABC. An obiter dictum cannot serve as a precedent – but it can inform new ones.

“There’s no evidence that the dictum was intended to be applied in this way,” says Peter Greste, professor of journalism at Macquarie University and executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He says the case “gives all sorts of subjects of media investigation an opportunity to threaten legal action and shut down otherwise important and legitimate journalistic investigations”.

The ruling also relies on “principles of equity rather than intellectual property law”, says Kylie Pappalardo, a senior lecturer in media law at Queensland University of Technology. Equity law addresses situations where other laws may lead to unfair outcomes. Pappalardo says its application is “unusual in copyright law” and that “the likely harm to the plaintiff” informed the judgement.

“I believe this is the first time the principle of equity has been applied to copyright laws,” says Greste. “This seems to be a situation where a very narrow chain of reasoning around property law leads to a really perverse outcome when it comes to freedom of speech and freedom of political communication.

“The reason we privilege freedom of speech so prominently is that it is a foundation to human rights … we need the power to speak out on breaches of rights and principles, even when they are hidden on private property. When we end up with judgements that subjugate that principle we have a problem.”

“The implications are bizarre,” says sociologist Brian Martin, who heads Whistleblowers Australia. Applied generally, the ruling “would mean that anyone photographed or videoed could claim copyright, undermining staples of news”. He says copyright law was never intended to be weaponised as a censorship tool.

GMC “pushed this case through a six-day trial and an appeal in one of the highest courts of Australia, simply to prevent footage from being published which shows their normal business operations”, says FTP’s Harley McDonald-Eckersall.

“They traded off press freedom as collateral to prevent airing of footage that shows nothing except the reality. This trial has always been about the public’s right to know.”

In the Federal Court, GMC director Eugene Tomasoni described the alleged cruelty as “a brief aberration … just a small glitch in a process”.

In response to questions from The Saturday Paper, GMC said through its legal team that FTP is not a whistleblower but a “political activist group” and the company “is legally entitled to control who enters its private property and who does not.”

GMC’s solicitor Chris Neville says the belief that this precedent has widespread implications for journalists and whistleblowers “would be incorrect”. The company “would not be making further comment while this matter remains before the courts.”

Pappalardo says the Corporations Act requires whistleblowers to report to an appropriate person or body before going public after 90 days in public-interest cases, and only if “they give written notice to the relevant Commonwealth body about their intention to make a public interest disclosure”.

McDonald-Eckersall says this provision “relies on the authorities doing the right thing. Forty-eight hours after we made an official report to the department, they informed the slaughterhouse and provided them with the footage”.

“No formal investigation ever commenced,” adds Delforce. “If we gave the department 90 days every time, we’d be sued every time.” DAFF has confirmed that it did not investigate until “late November 2024” – seven months after the charity’s complaint, and only after the Federal Court case.

These are among reasons animal investigators “end up breaching the law … because there is no other way to expose these practices,” says Delforce.

Sometimes journalists, too, “end up breaking the law”, says Greste. “I’ve crossed borders illegally to get into a country to film abuses. Most reasonable people would recognise what we exposed was important enough to justify breaking the law to reveal something in the public interest.

“This is not to say the end always justifies the means, but we have to create a system where the public’s right to know is recognised in court and weighted against relatively narrow commercial interests.

“Public interest needs to be taken into account. In Australian law there is no mechanism for doing that other than a constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.”

Public interest in cases of alleged animal cruelty is curtailed by what lawyers and activists know as “ag-gag” – a complex of legal mechanisms that criminalise covert filming of farm practices. These include Victoria’s Livestock Management Amendment (Animal Activism) Act and New South Wales’s Surveillance Devices Act, which makes it illegal to “film acts of animal cruelty without the abuser’s consent” and to “share or even view such footage”, according to former NSW parliamentarian Mark Pearson. Pearson has mounted a High Court challenge to this.

“Journalists already face a legal quagmire in relying on the FTP’s footage, particularly in NSW,” says Christopher Knaus, chief investigations correspondent with Guardian Australia. “My fear is that there will be a chilling effect on newsrooms and what small semblance of transparency and accountability we have will be lost.”

Meanwhile, FTP investigators face routine arrest and the prospect of huge penalties and jail terms.

For Delforce, this month’s police raid recalled one in 2015, after he’d released Lucent, a documentary on the pig industry. Then, a dozen police took $20,000 worth of film equipment, and court challenges followed.

He rebuilt FTP resources but now faces monumental legal costs. He says the charity is “exploring options to appeal this decision to the High Court”.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "Scrubbing the kill floor".

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