Who Owns What C-Span Airs?
Submitted by jajacobs on Wed, 2007-02-28 10:31.
There have been a few stories recently about C-Span and whether or not its broadcasts are copyrighted. (See list at end of this post.) This started when Republicans claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi illegally posted C-Span video clips of House floor footage. Later, they withdrew that complaint after some clarification by C-Span of their policies. The clarifications led to more confusion, though. Now Nancy Scola has posted a very useful and clear article about the issue:
- Who Owns What C-Span Airs?, Nancy Scola, The OpenHouse Project, February 27th, 2007.
This kind of issue will undoubtedly continue to be important to the extent that privatization of government communication expands and private companies and politicians attempt to use "intellectual property" law to constrain access of public information to the public.
More:
- Congressional Video In Vogue, Tech Daily Dose, February 16, 2007.
- C-Span's IP Policies For Congress Called Inconsistent, by Andrew Noyes, National Journal's Technology Daily, Feb 16, 2007 PM edition, [subscription required]
- Which Videos Are Protected? Lawmakers Get a Lesson, by Noam Cohen, The New York Times, February 26, 2007.
- MetaVid (a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings.)
- Ripping (off) the Congressional video record by Carl Malamud.
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Malamud's hack!
2 things:
1) malamud's hack is awesome! I following the link over to the internet archive and the first video was: "The IT Assessment: A Ten-Year Vision for Information Technology in the House" from the House Committee on House Administration. Not only that, but there was a link to a report submitted to the Committee for review during this hearing. (Report in PDF). What a cool idea to bring together the video with the paper trail -- will the Congressional Record be threaded in there as well in the future?
2) a little housekeeping. I updated the link to the NYT to go to the NYT archive via their RSS feed. That way, users don't have to register and will be able to get to the article beyond the 2 week window that NYT sets for public/non-registered access to its website. You can do that too by using the NYT Link Generator (also available as a bookmarklet! Aaron Swartz ROCKS!!). Anytime you're linking to a NYT article, please use the link generator.
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