Submission + - C-SPAN: Liberating & Restricting Floor Footage
bigmammoth writes: "C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the US government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high quality ogg theora using all open source software guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions.
If C-SPAN succeeds reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all of already "liberated" committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of "dignity and decorum" and will be denying C-SPANS request"
If C-SPAN succeeds reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all of already "liberated" committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of "dignity and decorum" and will be denying C-SPANS request"
