An article in Technology Review reports on the current state of video on the web, its drawbacks and limitations, and what the future may bring.

• OurTube, By David Talbot, Technology Review (September/October 2009). (3400 words)

The article summarizes the story of Michael Dale and Abram Stern who wanted to use speeches in the U.S. Congress and discovered that they could not get the videos. "There was no online repository for download." Their efforts led to the development of http://metavid.org/ which offered legislative videos for free download, a copyright battle with C-SPAN, and a change in C-SPAN policy to make some of its videos freely available for some uses. (See also Who Owns What C-Span Airs?, and C-SPAN provides more access, but wants to retain control, etc..)

Dale and Stern's difficulties offer one small glimpse into a larger problem with online video: unlike much of the rest of the Web, it is accessed through a collection of closed, proprietary formats, such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. (Try a video search engine such as Blinkx; you'll get plenty of videos pulled from around the Web, but to watch them you may need to download or update software.) Certain websites, led by YouTube, convert uploaded content to Flash for ease of viewing. Today, however, a growing number of technologists and video artists want to see Web video adopt the kind of open standards that fueled the growth of the Web at large. HTML, the markup language that describes Web pages; JavaScript, the programming language that allows forms, graphics, and various special effects to be added to them; JPEG, the standard for images--all these building blocks of the Web can be used by anyone, without paying fees or asking permission. This openness was indispensable to the creation and then the explosion of blogs, search engines, social networks, and more.

Talbot quotes Chris Blizzard, director of technical evangelism at Mozilla, as he explains why open standards are so important:

Open standards create low friction. Low friction creates innovation. Innovation makes people want to pick it up and use it. But it's not something where we can guess what 'it' is. We just create the environment that lets 'it' emerge.

Too much government information (not just video) suffers from being locked in to proprietary formats and proprietary means of delivering that information. (See: What is wrong with this picture? and lots more at the open formats tag here at FGI.)

Blizzard says that we need to take "video out of the plug-in prison." Talbot says, "The goal isn't to make any one application possible but to bring about the next Internet revolution--one whose specific form is hard to foresee, except that it's likely to be televised."

Official government publications, reports, laws, hearings, and judicial decisions are only a part of the collection of the University of Georgia's Civil Rights Digital Library. The collection includes a variety of audio visual media, most notably historical news film of a broad range of key civil rights events. In addition to the news film, the digital library provides a seamless virtual library connecting related digital collections from 75 libraries, archives, and museums across the nation. Most are original documentation of the period, such as oral histories, letters, diaries, FBI files, and photographs. It also has instructional materials to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process.

See also: History comes alive, by K.K. Snyder, The Albany Georgia Herald July 20, 2008.

As Peggy pointed out here yesterday (C-SPAN Announces New Copyright Policy), C-SPAN has changed its policies to make it easier to use videos of official events sponsored by Congress and federal agencies. This will make C-SPAN videos of congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House available for re-use under two conditions: "...will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution." [emphasis by C-SPAN in its press release]

This is a very interesting issue for government information specialists and not just for the obvious reasons (better public access to more information more easily, access to rich audio-visual content, etc.).

It is also of interest because it raises questions of control. C-SPAN is careful to retain its control of the videos as if it owned them. As Liza Sabater has pointed out (News from C-SPAN posted to Open House Project group by Liza Sabater, Mar 7, 12:45 pm), by only allowing non-commercial use, C-SPAN prohibits use by many bloggers and independent citizen activists:

Bloggers who function as corporations and take in advertising would not be able to use the footage.... If I wanted to use content for parody or a mashup I would not be able to use it because of the little detail of for-profit incorporation.

There is some additional discussion on the Open House Project group discussion list as to the exact legal implications of this, but I believe that the most important point for government information specialists is that C-SPAN is acting as if it owns and can control access to and specify use of this content. While it is very good news that C-SPAN is making this content more freely usable, it is bad news that C-SPAN is not relinquishing its control or "ownership" of the content.

As Liza points out eloquently (Chalk one up for fair use: C-SPAN has agreed to loosen the copyright of the public domain footage they use, CultureKitchen, March 7, 2007):

If they are indeed a non-profit, they have been quite bullish about the "copyright" they hold on the public domain footage they broadcast. Basically they've made it impossible to use congressional video footage by having a few seconds of original content a the beginning of all congressional videos, slapping their logo on it and claiming, then it's their original content.

This should sound familiar to anyone who has dealt with private publishers who repackage government documents, slap a title page on their versions, and claim copyright. We also see repackagers of CRS reports claiming proprietary rights to those reports (Congress has created a bootleg market for CRS Reports, jajacobs 2007-02-20) and even to lists of titles of those reports!

So, to me, the C-SPAN issue is another example of the same fight for control of government information that we have seen before and continue to see today. Even GPO wants to provide government information on a "cost recovery" basis as if it owned that information. The fight with C-SPAN, with publishers, and with the government itself is not over.

Background on recent events:

• Who Owns What C-SPAN Airs?
• Malamud Challenges C-SPAN
• C-SPAN Announces New Policy for Online Video "C-SPAN Takes Lead In Making Video Of Congressional Hearings, White House And Other Federal Events More Widely Available To The Online Community." C-SPAN Press Release, March 7, 2007