The upcoming presidential elections have been a good indicator of how much the internet now influences our day-to-day lives. The candidates are much more adept at using the internet than in the 2004 elections. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama launched their presidential campaigns on their web sites, and many candidates have a My Space account. For the first time, two presidential debates will be conducted online. Yahoo, online news site Slate, and The Huffington Post political blog will host the debates, which will be moderated by PBS’s Charlie Rose.
The Commission on Presidential Debates sponsors all presidential debates. Their website has debate transcripts from 1960 to the 2004, and every page of their website has this at the bottom:
© 2004 Commission on Presidential Debates. All rights reserved.
Kind of a buzz-killer, huh? A lot can happen, though, in four years, and the copyright issue has come to the forefront for the 2008 election. NPR and Iowa Public Radio are hosting two presidential debates and have announced they will post them on-line, freely accessible to anyone. CNN will do the same with their debates. Barack Obama sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee asking that all videos of Democratic Presidential debates be licensed under creative commons:
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.
Let’s hope that the Commission on Presidential Debates and the other debate hosts jump on this bandwagon.
I think I feel as surprised as you do about copyrighted presidential debates. It’s interesting that the copyrights begin in 1960, coincident with more popular television broadcasting. It makes me wonder about famous speeches by Abraham Lincoln, and what application of copyright might’ve done to debate over them. I am thinking, too, of attempts by the Bush administrative team to limit photography of him during debates with Kerry to certain angles, in order to prevent the public from seeing the disallowed radio feed underneath his jacket and leading to his ear. How far can a public official go in controlling a publicly created image?
But isn’t democracy’s intent moral and legal egalitarianism? Shouldn’t all documents generated by our elected and appointed political representatives, and activities engaged upon in our name, automatically be in the public domain? Even information related to “national security” should be declassified under a different schedule than that of copyright.
Barack Obama’s plea for a Creative Commons contract, and in fact even his knowledge of such a thing, is unexpected and quite refreshing. Somebody is paying attention, it seems. (I recently read through the entirety of the Creative Commons licensing agreements and I am planning on using them for all of my copyright needs.) I hope that reliance on the Internet to broadcast presidential debates is not exclusive, and that its video, audio and transcription is available in a timely, unrestricted manner.
Comment by Steve — May 21, 2007 @ 5:59 am