TOPDOG08.COM

« Bandar in the dog house? | Main | Immigration raids split families »

March 07, 2007

C-SPAN grudgingly endorses open democracy

This is actually the best news I've heard all day, perhaps all week.

C-SPAN liberalizes its copyright policies

by kos

Wed Mar 07, 2007 at 12:08:37 PM PST

We've been trashing C-SPAN for its restrictive copyright policies. While its coverage of floor debate is in the public domain (the cameras they use are owned by the government), C-SPAN has asserted copyright ownership over committee hearings. In fact, it sent Nancy Pelosi a cease-and-desist letter after she posted a clip of a committee hearing speech on her site.

The blowback must've been tremendous, and C-SPAN claims it is adopting a Creative Commons license, effective immediately, for all coverage of governmental proceedings. From an email release:

Advancing its longstanding mission of bringing government closer to the people, C-SPAN announced today two major initiatives designed to greatly expand citizen access to its online video of federal government activities, such as congressional hearings, agency briefings, and White House events. These actions are intended to meet the growing demand for video about the federal government and Congress, in an age of explosive growth of video file sharers, bloggers, and online ‘citizen journalists.’ The policy change is effective immediately.

C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency-- about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks--which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.

In addition, C-SPAN also announced plans to significantly build out its capitolhearings.org website as a one-stop resource for Congressionally-produced webcasts of House and Senate committee and subcommitte hearings [...]

The new C-SPAN policy borrows from the approach to copyright known in the online community as “Creative Commons.” Examples of events included under C-SPAN’s new expanded policy include all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House. C-SPAN's copyright policy will not change for the network's studio productions, all non-federal events, campaign and political event coverage, and the network’s feature programming, such as Book TV and original history series.

Posted by Mike at March 7, 2007 07:13 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/1024

Comments

Post a comment