CNN To Release Debates Under Creative Commons

remove office writes "After calls from several prominent bloggers and a couple of presidential candidates, CNN has agreed to release the footage from its upcoming June presidential debates uncopyrighted. Senator Barack Obama was the first candidate to call for all presidential debates to be released under Creative Commons, with fellow Democratic hopeful John Edwards following shortly afterwards. CNN will be the first to do so with their June 3rd and 5th Democratic and Republican debates. MSNBC hosted the first presidential debates recently but refused to release them under Creative Commons, opting instead to post online only commercial-ridden clips in Windows Media format."

You can watch them on YouTube anyhow

[dircha]

I don't own a television. Transcripts don't really give a complete sense of the candidate's performance. Luckily I've been able to find the debates so far for both parties on YouTube.

Just search for "republican presidential debate part" or "democrat presidential debate part" respectively on YouTube. They're split into 9 minute chunks.

I think it would be awfully bad form for MSNBC to pull these from YouTube. But I commend the candidates and CNN for making this issue public. We shouldn't have to rely on the good will (or hesitant takedown action) of MSNBC in order to get coverage of the men and women, one of whom will in a relatively short amount of time hold the highest political office in our democracy.

But sometimes I'm not sure why I care, or that I do. Especially when I see headlines like this: "FLASH: FOXNEWS O'REILLY TOPS MSNBC GOP DEBATE".

And look at the viewership numbers. That's right, not only did less than 1% of elligible voters even WATCH that debate, MORE people watched some blowhard talk about the debate than watched the debate itself.

This should dominate mainstream broadcast and print media. This should preempt regular programming on every broadcast channel.

Re:On a closely related sidenote:

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

In Sweden one can only publish books that are copyrighted. Any book that has noone claiming copyright for it means that the printer of the book are forced to take the responsibilty _and_ the copyright for the book. If the original author are found he/she cant disclaim their copyright.

Thus all books are copyrighted by someone - but it may not always be the original author.

  Thus every book published will have someone who holds the books copyright.

I doubt Sweden is the only country that have laws like this.

Indeed

[rolfwind]

The companies want to choose the "acceptable" candidates for you rather the populace choosing themselves. The primaries are very important in party politics and when people complain that they only have a choice between a douche and turd on election day must be informed that they get whittled down to that choice because they consider eleection day all important and not the primaries and that "vote". May not be fair but it is true.

The mainstream media is silent on these candidates, but Digg is abuzz with Ron Paul and Mike Gravel. Please looking up these two and consider actively spreading the word about who you like (either of these two or other candidates you find). Or do you guys want to be stuck with a Bush vs. Kerry like candidates in 2008 with both sides sucking?

Ron Paul:
http://digg.com/search?s=%22ron+paul%22&submit=Sea rch&section=news&type=both&area=promoted&sort=new [digg.com]

Mike Gravel:
http://digg.com/search?s=%22mike+gravel%22&submit= Search&section=news&type=both&area=promoted&sort=n ew [digg.com]

But Which CC License?

[rmckeethen]

Unfortunately, none of the referenced articles/links specifies which of the various Creative Commons licenses will be used to release the debates. Having just released a photo project under a CC license, it appears that there are at least four basickinds of CC licenses, and some varients on them:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ [creativecommons.org]

The no-derivitives license in particular could have a big impact, especially for people looking to throw up stuff on YouTube and whatnot.

Re:But Which CC License?

[Phroon]

The most restrictive CC license is either the Developing Nations 2.0 [creativecommons.org] or possibly the Founders' Copyright [creativecommons.org], both of which would place the debates under normal copyright in the United States. Using either one of these would be a great disservice.

The Free Software Foundation warns about CC licences [gnu.org]:

There is literally no specific freedom that all Creative Commons licenses grant. Therefore, to say that a work "uses a Creative Commons license" is to leave all important questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement, please suggest making it clearer. And if someone proposes to "use a Creative Commons license" for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately "Which one?"

For example, the nc (no commercial use) and nd (aka NoDerivs, meaning no derivative works) Creative Commons "options" clearly make any license nonfree. Please don't use them.

Re:Wonderful!

[remove office]

Now if we can get CSPAN to do the same.

Under C-SPAN's contract, they use government-provided cameras on the House and Senate floor for constitutional reasons. Everything that is shot on government equipment is in the public domain by default. The only copyrighted-material that C-SPAN creates is material they make with their own cameras (such as footage from events outside of Congress, like the White House Correspondents Association dinner, etc).

There was a big hullabaloo over whether or not C-SPAN should use copyright material shot at committee hearings earlier this year, but AFAIK they gave in to requests from the House of Representatives (in fact I think Speaker Pelosi actually stepped in) that the footage be public domain.

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