C-SPAN: OurTube?
A few weeks ago, the Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi posted a one-minute clip of her speech at a House committee hearing onto her YouTube account and on her blog. The footage had originally aired on C-SPAN, and so C-SPAN requested that she remove the material immediately for abusing their copyright policy. C-SPAN asserted ownership of the content in a manner that parallels Viacom’s recent request that YouTube expunge its users highlight clips from programs like the Daily Show.
This caused some confusion amongst lawmakers, content consumers, and content creators. Does C-SPAN have the same ownership rights of our government’s “content” that Viacom has over John Stewart’s moments of zen? Many citizens were outraged and felt that C-SPAN was overstepping their privileges. Carl Malamud, an experienced technology advocate, wrote an open letter to CEO Brian Lamb summarizing these sentiments:
C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.
The issue is complicated because not everything C-SPAN covers is official government business. For example, last year’s sidesplitting coverage of the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner with host Steven Colbert was not a federal matter and would be categorized as comic entertainment, whereas a congressional hearing on farm subsidies is considered in the public domain.
In a recent New York Times article, Bruce Collins, the corporate vice president and general counsel of C-SPAN, said, “It is perfectly understandable to me that people would be confused… They say, ‘When a congressman says something on the floor it is public domain, but he walks down the street to a committee hearing or give a speech and it is not public domain?’”
Collins continued to clarify the financial mechanics of their organization:
What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-SPAN is a business, just like CNN is… If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.
After the dust settled, C-SPAN decided not to pursue copyright claims for its Congressional coverage. They issued a press release announcing their new policy, which borrows heavily from the “Creative Commons” approach.
C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency-- about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks--which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.
According to Malamud, broadcast-quality video of our government’s proceedings available for public download would be an obvious step for Congress to take in an effort to increase their transparency. Carl Malamud followed up his letter to C-SPAN with a report to Rep. Pelosi detailing exactly how this could and should be done:
Adopting a goal that by the end of the 110th Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives will offer broadcast-quality video of the floor and all hearings for download on the Internet is a reachable goal and one that will set a standard for transparency and openness. Your leadership in embracing this goal would set an example for all branches of the federal government, indeed for all governments here and abroad. If a hearing is to be considered truly public, the public has to be able to see it, both now and forever. I encourage you to adopt this standard as a goal for the 110th Congress.