Slashdot Mirror
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."
To license (creative) work under a Creative Commons license does NOT mean to have that stuff "uncopyrighted" - not even outside of Europe, where copyright is mandatory and cannot be renounced at all (except for by the death of the work's author having passed for some 70 years or so).
"Uncopyrighted" would probably mean to have the work put into the public domain - that's, however, not true for the CC-licenses, nor is it for any other "free" license (like GNU GPL, GNU FDL, BSDL, MITL and Co.) I know. All these licenses cleverly make use of copyright to guarantee certain freedoms and/or restrictions.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Is of course quite different from a Creative Commons license. (Assuming by "uncopyrighted" they mean "into the public domain").
Seems like a good idea, anyway. What's the point of having a debate if you don't let people debate the debate?
(That was a rhetorical question, please don't comment on it).
No! Not Proprietary! Anything but Proprietary! Ahh! It burns! It burns us!
:P)
(Sorry but the enthusiasm with which you said that was a little much or at least that's how I read it
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
I think it's a stretch to call any of them presidential.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I don't own a television. Transcripts don't really give a complete sense of the candidate's performance. Luckily I've been able to find the debates so far for both parties on YouTube.
Just search for "republican presidential debate part" or "democrat presidential debate part" respectively on YouTube. They're split into 9 minute chunks.
I think it would be awfully bad form for MSNBC to pull these from YouTube. But I commend the candidates and CNN for making this issue public. We shouldn't have to rely on the good will (or hesitant takedown action) of MSNBC in order to get coverage of the men and women, one of whom will in a relatively short amount of time hold the highest political office in our democracy.
But sometimes I'm not sure why I care, or that I do. Especially when I see headlines like this: "FLASH: FOXNEWS O'REILLY TOPS MSNBC GOP DEBATE".
And look at the viewership numbers. That's right, not only did less than 1% of elligible voters even WATCH that debate, MORE people watched some blowhard talk about the debate than watched the debate itself.
This should dominate mainstream broadcast and print media. This should preempt regular programming on every broadcast channel.
Come on. The debates themselves ARE commercial-ridden clips. The pandering? The acting? The party-line quotes? The weeks of "prep time" these alleged law-makers indulge while honing their so-called "debate" skills? The "I'm presidential" BS? So what if MSCNBCNSC runs them with commercials.
After two stories on this in a few days, is Slashdot sure it wants to hang their hats here on this issue?
The debate format died 20 years ago, was resurrected by Saint Perot, and then was again laid to a peaceful sleep.
The debates now are nothing more than traps. If you attend a debate and get caught in a trap, you are dead. If you lose your temper or slip up, or say "um" too many times, you are dead. Does anyone really think that some candidate will suddenly have some nation-shocking insight that will capture us?
All debates now require that news programs compare every candidate's makeup to Richard Nixon in 1960. WTF? CCGIGO. Creative-commons garbage in...
Moe
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Youtube is going to be clogged with eight-billion videos of clips out of context and "deep" bad voiceovers explaining why [Candidate X] is the worst/best thing after the devil/Jesus
And the annoyance of having links of all of them e-mailed to me pales to the joy that America is becoming (slightly) more democratic
Your ad here. Ask me how!
American public political speech for the purposes of running a civil society should be de facto uncopyrightable. This is how you run a (supposed) democracy. If they don't like it, they can pay the entire annual FCC budget for every clip they want to keep to themselves. We GIVE them spectrum, we PAY to defend and protect it for them, this REALLY IS the very least they can do.
Personally, I think they should be compelled to air ??? hours of campaign content to help run the system that makes them their fortunes - it might start to reign-in some of the insane budgets "needed" to "win" office these days.
This is the best Democracy money can buy?!?!?
The companies want to choose the "acceptable" candidates for you rather the populace choosing themselves. The primaries are very important in party politics and when people complain that they only have a choice between a douche and turd on election day must be informed that they get whittled down to that choice because they consider eleection day all important and not the primaries and that "vote". May not be fair but it is true.
a rch§ion=news&type=both&area=promoted&sort=new
= Search§ion=news&type=both&area=promoted&sort=n ew
The mainstream media is silent on these candidates, but Digg is abuzz with Ron Paul and Mike Gravel. Please looking up these two and consider actively spreading the word about who you like (either of these two or other candidates you find). Or do you guys want to be stuck with a Bush vs. Kerry like candidates in 2008 with both sides sucking?
Ron Paul:
http://digg.com/search?s=%22ron+paul%22&submit=Se
Mike Gravel:
http://digg.com/search?s=%22mike+gravel%22&submit
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").
Let the YouTube mashups begin!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The Free Software Foundation warns about CC licences:
Now if we can get CSPAN to do the same.
Under C-SPAN's contract, they use government-provided cameras on the House and Senate floor for constitutional reasons. Everything that is shot on government equipment is in the public domain by default. The only copyrighted-material that C-SPAN creates is material they make with their own cameras (such as footage from events outside of Congress, like the White House Correspondents Association dinner, etc).
There was a big hullabaloo over whether or not C-SPAN should use copyright material shot at committee hearings earlier this year, but AFAIK they gave in to requests from the House of Representatives (in fact I think Speaker Pelosi actually stepped in) that the footage be public domain.
FTS:
How does a CC license mean the same as noncopyrighted?
IT DOESN'T! Creative Commons, like the GPL, relies on copyright to license works.
Furthermore, according to the CNN website,,
To me, that reads "public domain" and not even Creative Commons. What am I missing?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I don't care what license they release the presidential debates under. It will be "closed source" until the debates establish reasonable guidelines under which minor party candidates are allowed to participate.
I'm a Democrat, but the exclusion of Independents and candidates from the Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Socialist, and Reform parties (among others) is a far worse abuse of power than anything done by Microsoft at the height of its antitrust powers.
These are not non-partisan debates -- they are bipartisan affairs, and the rules are deliberately constructed to preserve the political monopolies of the two main parties. It makes for boring, highly scripted debates, where the same old questions receive the same pat soundbite answers. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for a two-party system, and voters deserves better.
Any party or independent campaign which has gotten itself on enough state ballots to theoretically win an election if they carried those states' electoral votes belongs in the presidential debates. As it stands now, a candidate's party must also meet an unrealistic standard of previous electoral performance. This is pretty much impossible, given that minor parties are denied the millions of dollars of free advertising doled out by the media to the already well-funded Democrats and Republicans.
Rather than talking about open licensing for a series of closed debates, let's talk about forbidding their free broadcast over public airwaves until they amount to more than an undocumented campaign contribution by the networks.
Open the damn debates and quit feigning openness with this BS about a Creative Commons license.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.