CNN To Release Debates Under Creative Commons

remove office writes "After calls from several prominent bloggers and a couple of presidential candidates, CNN has agreed to release the footage from its upcoming June presidential debates uncopyrighted. Senator Barack Obama was the first candidate to call for all presidential debates to be released under Creative Commons, with fellow Democratic hopeful John Edwards following shortly afterwards. CNN will be the first to do so with their June 3rd and 5th Democratic and Republican debates. MSNBC hosted the first presidential debates recently but refused to release them under Creative Commons, opting instead to post online only commercial-ridden clips in Windows Media format."

Comments

Re:On a closely related sidenote:

[QuantumG]

There is no-where in the world where you are prohibited from disclaiming copyright on a work.

I don't know how that rumour got started.

Re:On a closely related sidenote:

[Harmonious Botch]

In Sweden one can only publish books that are copyrighted. Any book that has noone claiming copyright for it means that the printer of the book are forced to take the responsibilty _and_ the copyright for the book. If the original author are found he/she cant disclaim their copyright.

Thus all books are copyrighted by someone - but it may not always be the original author. What happens when a publisher or author who owns a copyright dies without heirs? Or if an author submits a book to a publisher using a false id? Or if a publisher prints a book anonymously?

Thus all books are copyrighted by someone - but it may not always be the original author.

Thus every book published will have someone who holds the books copyright. Hmmm...sorry, but I'm really sceptical about this claim. Got any references to substantiate it?

Re:Creative Commons != copyright free

[remove office]

Thanks to you and everybody else in here complaining (rightfully), I've edited the article on my website to hopefully reflect the corrections people are offering. The Slashdot summary is not editable by me though.

Also, in answer to your question, a specific license has not been announced yet, but CNN has indicated that people will be free to do whatever they like with it (remix it, edit it, use it in a documentary, post it anywhere they want, etc).

One of the specific points that Obama had was that he wanted the footage to be free for people to use in creating things like remixed YouTube videos, etc ("end user created content").

Re:On a closely related sidenote:

[Plutonite]

Hey, I'm with you there. You guys have it easy in Australia, down here (good ole US of A) we WISH it was only about fighting corporations, rather than masses of extreme right wing/evangelist nutjobs. I never said voting changes anything, but in a democracy voting has a better chance of changing something than breaking the laws that exist because of the fact that we put democracy into use.

Also, nobody said that democracy is ideal in any way. If science was as fanatically reliant on public consensus, we would be in caves right now. But governance and morality is a different matter, and I am willing to give in to the (mistaken) majority if the only other option is to force my view on that majority. That's totalitarianism, and is doupleplusunnice. And if I violate the law, why shouldn't everybody else who is as convinced in their viewpoint as I?

Many share the view that democracy is a shitty system, but nobody has yet suggested viable alternatives. Maybe in the future we will have systems where pluralism is a more mature concept and points of view are "weighted" so as to defeat the herd-mentality problem, but for now, chaos cannot replace democracy while retaining civilization.