Chalk one up for fair use : C-SPAN has agreed to loosen the copyright of the public domain footage they use

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.

C-SPAN knows they are losing the battle with bloggers and citizen media. They were vicious, C&Ding bloggers who showed clips of Stephen Colbert's pwining of George Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. To this day, the only way to get it is at Video.Google.

You'd think they are TimeWarner-AOL ... Well, technically they are.

Given C-SPAN is paid for by all the major cable companies, their copyright and fair use practices have mirrored those of their funders. Which is why I am not satisfied with their Creative Commons announcement.

I want C-SPAN to declare that all Congressional footage they broadcast is public domain and free to use, alter and broadcast.

This is an incredibly important step because many bloggers are now functioning as small media business owners. The onus of fair use would fall into incorporated bloggers like yours truly, Crooks & Liars, DailyKos and others.

Thanks to the DMCA, it is easy for a company like TimeWarner-AOL to pre-emptively C&D me and other bloggers over the use of a cover of a magazine. I would have to take them to court to prove that my use of the cover of one of their magazines is fair use. They know it's fair use but they get away with criminalizing free speech by bloggers because, as either present of potential small business owners, we pose a threat to their monopoly.

Remember, blogs have the uncanny ability to easily network with each other. In theory, if the whole progressive blogosphere worked together as one service in which each blog were a channel, we could create a network effect that could rival the cable companies.

They know this. Instead of looking at it as an opportunity, the cable companies, especially Time-Warner, have looked at is a threat. The cable companies after all the #1 lobbyists against net neutrality.

This is a great victory, no doubt about it; but we need to do a bit more work in the fight for copy rights and fair use.

On that note : A partial list of the bloggers and internet activists responsible for this coup :

Abrams Stern, MetaVid
Andrew Rasiej, Personal Democracy Forum
Ari Schwartz, Center for Democracy and Technology
Ben Rahn, Act Blue
Britt Blaser, Open Resource Group
Clay Shirky, NYUâ€™s ITP
Conor Kenny, Congresspedia
Dan Manatt, PoliticsTV
Dan Newman, MapLight
David Alpert, Drinking Liberally
David Moore, Open Congress
Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation
Ezra Klein, blogger
Gary Bass, OMB Watch
Jock Friendly, Legistorm
John Wonderlich, Congressional Committees Project,
Josh Tauberer, Govtrack
Liza Sabater, Culture Kitchen
Marc Laitin, Wired for Change
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner
Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga, Daily Kos
Matt Stoller, MyDD
Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum
Mike Turk, NCTA
Nancy Scola, blogger
Nancy Watzman, Public Campaign
NZ Bear, Porkbusters and Truth Laid Bear
Robert Bluey, Heritage Foundation
Ryan Alexander, TaxPayers for Common Sense
Scott Chacon, Open Source Democracy Project
Sheila Krumholz, Center for Responsive Politics
Stacy Holmstedt, AZ Congresswatch
Steve Urquhart, Politicopia