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."

Comments

Re:Check

[Hobart]

Ok, that's the `keep the nerds happy with something to do with copyright` box checked.

OP is on the mark with this line. It's very nice to see Obama making a reference to CC ... but, what's this over here on Lessig's blog? (reads TFA) Pay closer attention! Obama's request is that they

1. WAIVE THE COPYRIGHT AND PLACE IT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN , or barring that,
2. 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 the /. summary neither mentions the public domain, nor makes it clear that Obama's letter shows an understanding of the distinction between waiving copyright and licensing.

Article 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.

--
Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up!

Re:Or not--or not again!

[Moridineas]

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.

Clarification..

[encoderer]

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.

Re:Good for him

[tbannist]

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.