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Liberating & Restricting C-SPAN's Floor Footage
bigmammoth writes "C-SPAN's bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions." (Continues)
"If C-SPAN succeeds, reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all already 'liberated' committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of 'dignity and decorum' and will be denying C-SPAN's request."
If you've got nothing to hide...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down.
They only want to "liberate" it to the extent that they control ownership. They're not interested in liberation of the footage in the true sense.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Having the video record of your government in action being controlled by a third party who wants to use it for their own commercial benefit is a good thing? Nice troll.
C-span is pointless. In this modern age, the only thing that excuses the fact that all the senate/house deliberations aren't available on the house/senate websites in a downloadable non-proprietary format is the fact that those two groups are made up of technological retards.
Seriously. There is no better definition of public domain. That content should be out there and viewable by more than just a few jaded press correspondents.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Of course you're going to have problems with the video from the floor being copyrighted if laws themselves are copyrighted!
See this article from LawMeme. A nonprofit website in Texas attempted to include area building codes that had been written by a company called SBCCI. SBCCI sued, saying that their copyright had been violated by this publication of the laws, as they made $72 per copy sold by them. A judge ruled in their favor, allowing them to restrict the public laws, saying that $72 was "sufficiently free" for citizens' access.
(This isn't the only instance, but searching for "copyrighted law" returns more chaff than wheat, thanks to arguments over copyright law in general. Bonus points for more citations, as I'm interested in this.)
> Everything that happens on the floor ends up in the Congressional
> Record anyway, which is publicly available within a couple days
> of it happening. It's text, which means it's searchable, which
> makes it a ton better than video when it comes to accessing what
> you need.
Garbage. It loses every nuance of the spoken word and human gestures which betray what a representative or witness really feels about a contentious issue. I vividly recall watching the Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, transfixed by the spectacle of it all, judging the true reactions of senators and witnesses on the committee floor by their body language and intonation. The written record of those proceedings is comparatively worthless. When contentious issues reach the main floor, the written record can be equally misleading about the real tenor of the debate. As Socrates would point out, the written word is dead and misleading compared to seeing a real person.
Interestingly, I went to the C-SPAN store recently hoping they'd offer the Thomas hearings on DVD so I could replace my ancient self-recorded EP VHS tapes. Nope. Perhaps the most important confirmation heaing in a generation, one which transfixed the general public so fully that several Saturday Night Live sketches parodied it, one which is *not at all* accurately reflected by the text record--and it's been gone from public view for well over a decade.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Before election: "Republicans are evil! The Democrats will provide the most open and ethical Congress in history! Just you wait, even C-SPAN will be allowed to broadcast live (so that congressman can't edit and revise the record as they already do before it's made public)!"
After election: "Those poor Democrats! They're being bullied by another evil corporation who wants to restrict something that's oh-so-open-and-free! Who cares about live, unedited coverage of house proceedings? We want the edited tablescraps that Congress decides we're worthy enough to view. When members of Congress start their speeches asking for unanimous support to revise the record later, that's a-okay because Nancy Pelosi is super-terrific!"
"Sufferin' succotash."