Re: Congressional streams mirrored

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Carl Malamud <carl () media org>
Date: February 27, 2007 8:34:02 AM JST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: Fwd: [IP] Congressional streams mirrored

> From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () cs columbia edu>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Congressional streams mirrored
>
> The issue of C-Span videos is more complex than it would seem.  Per an
> article in today's NY Times
> (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/technology/26cspan.html?
> ref=washington)
> some C-Span videos are copyrighted and not freely postable on the Net
> by others.

Steven is right.  This is a very interesting issue.

First, the stuff I'm doing is straight off of committee web sites.
So, C-SPAN isn't involved.  It is between me and the committee.  But,
some committees put copyright notices on their files.  That means
that Google Video, in random tests, sees that the creator and the
copyright holder are not the same and takes my videos off line.

Related to that is C-SPAN.  It is widely felt that their feeds
from the floor are not under copyright.  That is because the  
government and
C-SPAN comingled resources for many years, and government proceedings
don't have copyright.  There is a very cool team at UC Santa Cruz called
Metavid that takes the floor proceedings as input to a search engine.

A third leg in this puzzle is the question of credentials.  You can't
bring a camera into a hearing if you are new media.  I had congressional
radio/tv credentials in 94-96, but that is because they weren't paying
attention.  But today, C-SPAN employees, congressional bureaucrats,
and other old media types sit on a credentials committee that enforces
an absolute ban on vloggers covering their hearings.

Some more background on this issue is in this hack:
http://www.archive.org/details/oscon_washington_mashup

Carl


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