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Obama Requests Creative Commons for Presidential Debates
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri May 04, 2007 09:02 AM
from the free-for-all-debate dept.
from the free-for-all-debate dept.
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently submitted a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential debates to be licensed under the Creative Commons. This move would give everyone the freedom to share, recut, and edit the debates as they wish. "I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible."
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Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to 2nd that!! I'm still VERY open minded to this next election...and this just put a big "+" mark next to his name so far.
Anything that starts to 'buck' the system a little I'm for. I thought I'd heard that MSNBC? was covering the debates, and was trying very hard to lock in all the content to themselves where no one could really publish parts of it, etc. The debates are (should be) and important part of the US public's decision making, and should therefore be completely free for use and analysis by the general public as they see fit.
You know...I've heard it say that the govt. takes your freedoms a little piece at a time. Well, maybe it works in reverse too? Every little thing that helps change the old party way/style in the elections, helps break the grip and open it up more to change......and I'm all for that.
If we could next somehow blow away the primary system for something else more open...we might be able to someday get actual GOOD candidates to the elections, rather than the predestined crap we seem to get from the parties which is largely decided either in advance, or apparently by the early primaries that seem to hold nothing in common with the majority of the US.
But, that's another story....start with baby steps....baby steps.....
Parent
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. That doesn't change the action itself, or whether or not we should get behind it.
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Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
This appears to be a simple case of "Sorry, your price is too high", unless someone can actually give a cogent (and truthful) reason why anyone should care.
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Re:Good for him (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats what gets me, is that discourse was never an option. It was just "I want it, and I will have it". Yes the guy who made the page asked an unacceptably high amount for the page, but still does not justify the Obama campaigns actions. I think Obama could have lived without "ownership" of the MySpace page, and thus resisted ALL headlines about his spending, or lack thereof. The page was in competent hands, and the campaign could still manipulate people using the page (they had full access). The status-quo was not broken. Obama's campaign just want COMPLETE control over everything dealing with their candidate, which I find more frightening than the MySpace ordeal itself.
As for the registering in his name bit; we must remember that this page is OLD, it wasn't spurred by Obama running for president, but by Obama originally running for senate, meaning this was a local thing and not some big hijacking thing.
I do wonder how much of this actually involves Obama himself, though, and how much is just an over-zealous campaign manager. At what level was this whole thing initiated.
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Re:Good for him (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Good for him (Score:5, Funny)
I think that's a good question, about the need for politicians to better address voter needs. In my campaign, we have had a tremendous, just, two-way dialogue with the voters in this country and that is definitely the way to go. That's why I have always been a big supporter of education. If I'm elected, I will give a lifetime tax exemption to anyone who pursues a PhD in anything. And that's what America needs right now.
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Creative Commons is good, but (Score:5, Funny)
If he takes a stand against alliteration (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:If he takes a stand against alliteration (Score:5, Funny)
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Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Silly Obama... (Score:5, Funny)
i'm conservative, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
boxlight
Re:i'm conservative, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
It's easy to label people with extreme views, but in reality most people are somewhere in the middle.
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Re:i'm conservative, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that conservative should not = religious nut job, but that's irrelevant. I'm sure there are plenty of nice moderate guys in the KKK but the guys in charge are wackos, and as a result anyone who supports their organization is supporting hate filled whack jobs and the same applies here. Until the conservatives in this country grow a pair and get someone other than a fundie cretin in charge of their political party, the game is still over and conservative might as well be the same as religious nut job. Because it's the religious nut jobs at the top making all the decisions and the fact that you are probably a nice reasonable conservative doesn't make them saner.
Parent
Re:i'm conservative, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me repeat: no one just "decides" to get an abortion nine months into a pregnancy. Even 8 or 7. Again, no one says, "oh, I hadn't made up my mind until now, and just decided to get an abortion." This is documented and figures are freely available online. There has not ever been an elective abortion that late.
Now, on the other hand, there are very rare abortions performed that late when the fetus is hydroencephalic and has a cranium filled with water and swollen up to the size of a watermelon. The fetus is brain dead, and if left to continue to swell, would kill the mother. This is exceedingly rare, but the only safe way to remove the fetus is D&E. You can do a C-section, but that's major surgery - it involves actually lifting the intestines up out of the body and putting them on the chest so that you can get to the uterus underneath. Scary shiat.
So, just drop the whole "those indecisive women" meme. It's stupid, dishonest, and is 100% wrong.
Parent
Re:i'm conservative, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah what you don't get. See, in this country, parties are like football teams. You pick your favorite and defend their bad decisions (play calls) until the end. Even in the face of overwhelming defeat and obvious bias in the referee's calls and penalties, you defend your team until the end. Cuz if you don't have a team, you are a bandwagon jumper! So you must pick your preconceived ideology and vote strictly based on that, despite the value of the actual candidates.
You've just realized one of the fundamental flaws of this America's government system.
Political candidates shouldn't be "enemies", they should have opposing viewpoints. The candidate who wins the most arguments should win the debate. But this is America, so all of that logic flies out the window and in the newly ajar window the "political pundits" come in and confuse everyone into thinking that each side did equally well. So that we can continue to believe there are two versions of the truth, and the only difference is which side you are rooting for.
Parent
Re:Or not--or not again! (Score:5, Informative)
Obama is a hard person not to like. Personally, I'm not wild about a lot of his vews--in his two years in the senate he has one of the very most left-wing voting records alongside Kerry, Kennedy, etc. But despite this, he's somehow managed to garb himself in the clothes of a moderate and a uniter? I'm not sure I see that... I'm not sure where in his record I should look to find this either. Despite this though, I like the guy..
Obama by all accounts HAS kept himself clean (minus some small real estate possible scandal). That's helped him out popularity-wise in Chicago--they carted away current and former politicians by the dozen while I lived there.. Back to Obama.. He's well educated and a powerful public speaker. He's got a definite charisma and he knows how to use it. Perhaps most importantly, he knows what to say--just look at the excitement that has built up around somehow who's been in national politics for two years.
Honestly, I think one could easily draw parallels between Ronald Reagan and Obama on that front--could Obama be the next Great Communicator? I don't know.. I also have no idea what Obama would actually do, beyond the party-line typical stuff that he has said in the past and/or voted for. Like the p/gp/ggp whoever else said, we don't really have a clue what his platform is.
Parent
Brilliant... Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Specificly... (Score:5, Informative)
"The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license."
There are many kinds of Creative Commons licenses, and not all of them are as permissive as the requested one.
All set for Lettermanisms (Score:5, Funny)
"I am a strong believer in
Good first step, but let's see more. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not convinced he's not just "throwing a bone" here. How about a campaign promise to veto any copyright extensions or new restrictions that come across his desk? To work to scale back the DMCA, and work the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act back to a genuinely, realistically "limited time", like the Constitution requires? To ensure that if the Internet streaming royalty increases go into effect, he'll work toward scaling them back? It's a nice thought and a good idea, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not much. If this is to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than promise to release one thing, he needs to be willing to take on the deep-pocket content industry, and in doing so, ensure that their bribes^Wcampaign contributions will go to the other side. Otherwise, it makes no real difference.
John Edwards too... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Check (Score:5, Informative)
- WAIVE THE COPYRIGHT AND PLACE IT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN , or barring that,
- place it under (SPECIFICALLY) the Creative Commons (Attribution) license. (Yes he specified one: http://creativecommons.org.nyud.net:8080/licenses
/ by/3.0/ [nyud.net] , if it's down, here's Wikisource of v2.5 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_Att ribution_2.5#English [wikisource.org] )
Reading theArticle summarizations that give half the story like this are why rms has to be such a pedantic language lawyer when speaking. Clarification of the article would be appreciated, scuttlemonkey.
--
Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up [sourceforge.net]!
Parent
Re:wtf? I think not... (Score:5, Informative)
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