C-SPAN Liberalizes Copyright Policy!

Today, C-SPAN has stepped into the digital age and announced the liberalization of their copyright policy. Now online bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone with something to say about their representative can post any federally sponsored event covered by C-SPAN online without fear of copyright reprisals.

From C-SPAN.org:

C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.

This is very good news for all online users of C-SPAN videos. These efforts to modernize their copyright policy should be applauded! Metavid can now focus more more the application layer, building interesting interfaces for remixing, contextualizing & participating with the audio video media assets of our government. The other great news about this announcement is that metavid can begin to capture and make available all of the committee footage broadcasted on C-SPAN in high quality ogg theora

We will also of course continue are work towards capturing committees footage as broadcasted by the goverment through webcasts to simultaneously make a public domain version available whenever possible. This insures the maximum freedom for participants interested in re-using this footage. The House and Senate floor footage ofcourse is public domain and not subject to C-SPAN‘ creative commons like license. As mentioned in a previous post Carl has made some great progress in the area of posting committee footage online.

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