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."

Comments

For and on behalf of all Non-American

[Anne Thwacks]

WTF?

Re:What? You don't like your own poison?

[Overly Critical Guy]

That house leadership being Nancy Pelosi. Now, what happened to all those pre-election promises about "the most open and ethical Congress in history?" After Murtha and other corrupt Democrats, now we find another promise broken. What a lame-duck House Speaker.

It will be interesting to see if all the anti-Bush Slashdotters who rattled on and on about the evil Republicans and their closed access will turn those criticisms onto the new Democratic Congress which is already divided between old-school liberals like Pelosi and these new conservative pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrats who won last November and voted against the corrupt Murtha.

Then again, this is the party with Sandy Berger, who can steal documents and hide them under a trailer and nobody bats an eye nor questions the claim that the 9/11 Commission already had copies. But if he was a Republican working for the Bush administration...