NBC Believes They Own Political Discourse

PoliSciASU writes "MSNBC has established draconian rules regarding the use of the Presidential Primary Debates on the internet. Some examples: '5. No excerpts may be aired after 8:30 pm on Saturday, May 26th. Excerpts may not be archived. Any further use of excerpts is by express permission of MSNBC only. 6. All debate excerpts must be taped directly from MSNBC's cablecast or obtained directly from MSNBC and may not be obtained from other sources, such as satellite or other forms of transmission. No portions of the live event not aired by MSNBC may be used.' Kevin Bondelli talks about why this is 'shameful and wrong'. Voters are missing out on the ability to actually have an engaged conversation about the candidates and their debate performances because of NBC's greed." Alexander Wolfe at InformationWeek and Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine share similar sentiments, and discuss the matter in different ways.

Comments

Oh please

[realinvalidname]

In the industry, this is called an "embargo", and it is absolutely typical. MSNBC owns their broadcast of the debate (under copyright law, they're the "creator" of the "creative work"), and these embargoes establish the degree to which they're willing to share their footage with other media outlets, for the sole reason that they depend on others sharing their work with MSNBC under similar terms. That it is a political news event is irrelevant -- similar terms would be used for coverage of breaking news, sports events, etc.

If anything, it's notable that MSNBC is willing to allow use by websites at all. A few years ago, there would be no such terms discussed, or there'd be a simple "no posting online".

If the terms were "take all you want and do what you want with it", the prevailing thinking is that anyone could broadcast or post the event in its entirety, without paying a dime, which would be a severe disincentive to MSNBC's production of it in the first place, which in turn would mean that all the MSNBC staffers and freelancers would be out of a job.

Full disclosure: I worked for CNN for 3.5 years.

Re:Fair Use

[Purity Of Essence]

I would be inclined to agree with you if this were a broadcast network we are talking about. FCC regulations compel broadcasters to cover events like this as part of their licensing agreement. The must cover events that are of broad interest to the people, namely news, political debates, and election coverage. That in a sense makes the networks a proxy of the government and as such the information broadcast should be freely available since we all payed for it in the form of licensing the publicly owned airwaves to the networks. However, even such a broad interpretation falls apart because the only product of the government that must enter the public domain is that which is produced by a government agency. Stuff produced for the government by private contractors is not subject to being placed into the public domain automatically. Further, since MSNBC is a cable network not a broadcast network, the FCC rules don't even apply to them. So MSNBC clearly has the right to restrict their coverage how they see fit. The real problem is broadcast networks not covering these debates in the first place, if they are not. We must not allow them to shirk their responsibilities, that is the real crime here.