Public Domain

I am a member of The Open House Project, a collaborative and bipartisan effort organized by The Sunlight Foundation to bring practices of transparency and openness to Congress through the use of digital and internet technologies.

Today we are able to declare a huge win for bloggers and citizen journalists alike. This is what Beltway Blogroll reports :

C-SPAN To Offer Free Access To Hearings
Andrew Noyes, one of my senior writers, has been covering this breaking story for Technology Daily the past couple of weeks. It started when House Republicans criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. -- and then retracted that criticism -- for posting footage from House floor debates on her new blog, The Gavel.

The story sparked a movement to make more congressional video freely available, and C-SPAN quickly obliged.

Here's what two C-SPAN executives said about the change in policy:

-- Executive Committee Chairman William Bresnan, the CEO of Bresnan Communications: "The C-SPAN board sees this as helping us carry out C-SPAN's public service mission. The cable industry created this network to allow citizens greater access to their government, and this enhancement appropriately reflects the rapid changes in the online information world."

-- President and co-chief operating officer Rob Kennedy: "Giving voice to the average citizen has been a centerpiece of C-SPAN's journalism since our network's founding in 1979. As technology advances, we want to continue to be a leader in providing citizens with the tools to be active participants in the democratic process.

This is huge.

Government cameras film all Congressional proceedings. The footage though, is broadcast mostly through C-SPAN. It is not clear to me if C-SPAN is a 501c(3) --even though their tag line is "created by the cable companies, offered as a public service" nowhere in their site does it say they are a not-for-profit.

If they are indeed a non-profit, they have been quite bullish about the "copyright" they hold on the public domain footage they broadcast. Basically they've made it impossible to use congressional video footage by having a few seconds of original content a the beginning of all congressional videos, slapping their logo on it and claiming, then it's their original content.

As much as I would like to take at face value the comments made by the higher ups at C-SPAN, this admission of fair use shows they are scared of losing what made them precious : their role of gatekeepers.

Welcome to our first ever Blog-In theater.

Thanks to the treasure trove of public domain movies I have found on Video.Google, I am going to make it a point for us to have a culturekitchen Saturday Matinée; followed up by a Sunday afternoon chat.

This is the original eco-terrorist and nuclear mutant-freak Godzilla; not the saviour of Japan reinvented in the 1960s. It has a very young Raymond Burr as, Steve Martin (the irony!) the American documentarian of this iguanadonian catastrophe. It oozes post-WW2 cheeziness through each reel hole.

What is most interesting about this first Godzilla is how it was made. There is a 1954 Japanese original. This is the 1956 American adaptation; which may well be the first successful film mashup ever produced in this country:

The adaptation process consisted of filming numerous new scenes featuring Raymond Burr and others, and inserting them into an edited version of the Japanese original to create a new film. The new scenes, written by Al C. Ward and directed by Terry Morse, were photographed by Guy Roe with careful attention to matching the visual tone of the Japanese film, while Burr's on-screen character appeared to interact with the original Japanese cast through intricate cutting and the use of doubles for the Japanese principals, in matching dress, shot from behind in direct interaction with Burr's character. (This same technique was used 29 years later in the film Godzilla 1985, with Raymond Burr reprising his original role of reporter Steve Martin.)