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Obama Requests Creative Commons for Presidential Debates
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently submitted a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential debates to be licensed under the Creative Commons. This move would give everyone the freedom to share, recut, and edit the debates as they wish. "I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible."
It's worth noting, though, that if this is just a Democratic National Committee matter, it would of course only apply to the Democrats' internal debate, and not the actual presidential debates which come later. Baby steps, baby steps..
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Specificly, from TFA:
"The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license."
There are many kinds of Creative Commons licenses, and not all of them are as permissive as the requested one.
More Twoson than Cupertino
You fallen for the trap that conservative == religious nut job. There are lots (I hope the non-vocal majority) of conservatives that don't want to blow up abortion clinics and force religion on people. The same way there are lots of liberals that don't think choice means allowing abortions 9 months into a pregnancy.
It's easy to label people with extreme views, but in reality most people are somewhere in the middle.
I thought I'd heard that MSNBC? was covering the debates, and was trying very hard to lock in all the content to themselves where no one could really publish parts of it, etc.
You thought right: Here's the previous Slashdot Article.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
- WAIVE THE COPYRIGHT AND PLACE IT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN , or barring that,
- place it under (SPECIFICALLY) the Creative Commons (Attribution) license. (Yes he specified one: http://creativecommons.org.nyud.net:8080/licenses
/ by/3.0/ , if it's down, here's Wikisource of v2.5 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_Att ribution_2.5#English )
Reading theArticle summarizations that give half the story like this are why rms has to be such a pedantic language lawyer when speaking. Clarification of the article would be appreciated, scuttlemonkey.
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Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I spent a couple years living in Hyde Park, Chicago -- University of Chicago neighborhood where Obama lived (lives I guess), represented, etc. He's immensely popular there, and very well liked. Everyone I've ever talked to that has met him, has had good things to say about him.
Obama is a hard person not to like. Personally, I'm not wild about a lot of his vews--in his two years in the senate he has one of the very most left-wing voting records alongside Kerry, Kennedy, etc. But despite this, he's somehow managed to garb himself in the clothes of a moderate and a uniter? I'm not sure I see that... I'm not sure where in his record I should look to find this either. Despite this though, I like the guy..
Obama by all accounts HAS kept himself clean (minus some small real estate possible scandal). That's helped him out popularity-wise in Chicago--they carted away current and former politicians by the dozen while I lived there.. Back to Obama.. He's well educated and a powerful public speaker. He's got a definite charisma and he knows how to use it. Perhaps most importantly, he knows what to say--just look at the excitement that has built up around somehow who's been in national politics for two years.
Honestly, I think one could easily draw parallels between Ronald Reagan and Obama on that front--could Obama be the next Great Communicator? I don't know.. I also have no idea what Obama would actually do, beyond the party-line typical stuff that he has said in the past and/or voted for. Like the p/gp/ggp whoever else said, we don't really have a clue what his platform is.
That guy named a site after a well-known person and attempted to hold it ransom for much more than it was worth.
It was clearly marked as a "fan site.".. The price tag the guy set on it was to pay him back for the 160,000 user community he had formed which even myspace said he had a right to. He didn't want to stop doing the page--he would've kept doing the fan site for free. He asked for cash because, since they were forcing off his own project anyway, he thought he should be compensated for what he had lost.
The campaign didn't negotiate with him, and ended up promising him $10,000. This happened briefly before they strong-armed myspace to step in. It is not for you to say how much he can sell his OWN stuff for. Judging from the amount of work he put into it, and that he didn't want to give it up, it's obvious to me that he was not asking for too much.
The guy didn't have a right to Obama's name. He also didn't have a right to force himself into the campaign as he attempted.
He wasn't doing anything like that. He made the page and started it from the ground up and was an avid supporter of Obama, just trying to do his part. Over time, the community got huge under his care, and Obama's campaign stepped in and said "hey, nice work, gimme!".
Note that only the link - barack obama's name - got transferred, the idiot still has his page.
What? No. They transfered it to another URL and dropped his friends. All myspace did was transfer his text to another account. He lost EVERYTHING of value.
Losing a URL to a website, as any idiot can piece together, often ends an online community. This community was not created by the obama campaign. They could've setup an "official" page with a different URL and left this poor guy alone. Instead, they hijacked myspace's terms of service and fear of law suits to steal this guy's URL and destroy all his work.
The site was clearly labeled "unofficial," and the entire community knew it as such. The campaign simply wanted the address. Personally, I think it hurt them more than their new URL could ever help.
He deserves what he got. If you don't want your site to be transferred, don't name it after a public figure. If this had been a registrar issue the result would have been no different.
Registrar issues are vastly different than free myspace accounts. He wasn't even posing as Obama, so there's no legal issue here. Obama does not own the myspace.com/barackobama url any more than he owns en.wikipedia.com/Barack_Obama.
If I were Joe Anthony, I'd sue the Obama campaign if I could.
Latewire
Obama's letter shows an understanding of the distinction between waiving copyright and licensing.
The parent makes an excellent point. Also I want to point out that it's not very surprising that Obama knows the distinction between waiving a copyright and licensing, he has a JD from Harvard and taught constitutional law for over ten years See Wikipedia
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
I want to clarify some things:
1. Joe Anthony "locked out" the Obama campaign by changing the password after the campaign rejected his $50k offer. So they no longer had access.
2. Anthony violated MySpace ToS by creating a site representing himself as Barack Obama. He didn't call it a fan site. He didn't say "People for Obama" or whatever.
3. Obama didn't take ANYTHING from Anthony EXCEPT the URL. That's it. All Anthony has to do is pick another, more acceptable URL and his page with all 160k friends will be restored
4. The page was being updated less and less frequently and at the same time it was growing more and more popular. The campaign needed to manage its resource more effectively. Go figure.
Actually, I think he's more or less correct:
1) Obama's team started a new site.
2) They applied to have the url myspace.com/barackobama pointed to the new official site.
3) Myspace shut down the old fan page because the owner wasn't Barrack Obama
I don't know if Obama's team intended for step 3 to take place. When you understand the events, it's hard to see this as a black and white issue instead of just an angry disagreement between people. It wasn't handled very deftly, so I guess the lesson for everyone involved is:
When you act like an ass you get burned.
That applies to both the volunteer and Obama's campaign staff.
Fanatically anti-fanatical