A bipartisan coalition is calling on the Republican and Democratic National Committees to provide OA to the televised debates of the presidential candidates. See the April 25 press release and blog post from Lawrence Lessig, lead organizer of the coalition. Excerpt from the blog post:
While many rightly and fairly struggle over genuinely difficult copyright questions, it has been the strategy of some of us to push for solutions to obvious problems first. The place of copyright in political debate is one such obvious problem. Technology has exploded the opportunity for people to comment upon, and spread political speech. Democracy is all about encouraging citizens to participate in that debate. And all of us, whether Democrats or Republicans, should push to remove unnecessary burdens to that participation....
Unfortunately, however, the uncertainty about the scope of copyright regulation is increasingly one such burden on Internet political speech. This next political cycle will see an explosion of citizen generated political content. Some of that speech will be crafted from clips taken from the Presidential debates....[A]s the law is right now, it is extremely difficult for an ordinary citizen to understand the boundaries of “fair use” ....That uncertainty, if not checked, could produce a cloud over much of this political speech...[and] create a temptation by some politicians to invoke copyright law to block particularly effective speech critical of them.
[We] are therefore calling upon both major political parties to make this problem go away. Not by changing the law, or by supporting some expensive and time consuming litigation. But instead, by simply promising to require of any network broadcasting Presidential debates (at least) that they license the debates freely after they are initially broadcast — either by putting the debates into the public domain, or by permitting anyone to use or remix the contents of those debates, for any reason whatsoever, so long as there is attribution back to any purported copyright holder....
There is incentive enough for politicians to debate, and opportunity enough for broadcasters to carry those debates....
PS: Kudos to Lessig for organizing it and to Obama, Edwards, and Dodd for their quick action. We still have to hear from the other candidates and from the parties. Will any say no?
Update. CNN has agreed to make all its broadcasts of the presidential debates available without restriction as soon as they air.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
