C-SPAN Posting Clips Online.

Following the liberalization of their copyright policy earlier this year C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!

update see also the sunlight post, and notice the link back in list-by-day descriptions here on metavid

This is a big step, providing a slew of additional timed “metadata” (bill data, index to congressional record) that we can use to enrich the metavid archive. The C-SPAN site is using the Congressional Record with archivists manually syncing up the record with the daily proceeding at per speaker granularity.[1] The closed caption based search which Metavid uses allows people to zero in on matching sections of video quicker but the official record is generally more accurate. Using both should greatly enhance the metavid search functionality and may help illuminate the revision and extension of remarks that congress people are always taking about.

The video C-SPAN is providing doesn’t currently integrate well into the blogging conversation – there doesn’t appear to be any way to embed it into a blog post. While the footage quality is a big step up from the 120×160 used on the main C-SPAN site, there doesn’t appear to be any broadcast resolution footage immediately available (except if you pay through the nose that their archive/store). Also it seems C-SPAN is in the early stages of populating their content as not all the video is available online yet. The metadata on Congressional Chronicle does not currently appear to be made available in a easily [re]usable format. We’d like C-SPAN to directly make it available in XML, but if nothing else the data can be scraped from the current site and then secondarily made available in XML.

This is a very exciting step forward from C-SPAN. We hope this progress will continue with C-SPAN making all their government coverage source mpeg2 files directly available like the mpeg2s metavid has been posting to archive.org. And we hope they expand the Congressional Chronicle archive to include all of the committee video and metadata. This will allow Metavid and other video projects to focus more on high level functionality such as tagging, collaborative video remixing, advanced search, representative/issue syndication etc.

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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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NY Times Get a Leson: Use Wikipedia

Here are some minor corrections to the article Which Videos Are Protected? Lawmakers Get a lesson published on February 26th.
The article quotes “C-Span said that it had for first time asserted its copyright against a video-clip site, ordering YouTube to take down copies of Stephen Colberts pointed speech…” This neglects a the smaller players that have been affected by C-SPAN take down notices see the C-SPAN and intellectual property article on Wikipedia.

Additionally the articles does not address the trademark issue. Although the floor footage is public domain the only copy the public has access to is encumbered with C-SPAN’s trademark and this has provided a grounds for which C-SPAN has requested sites take down otherwise public domain footage. Our site metavid has been hosing this public domain footage with the trademark removed. Metavid’s conversations with C-SPAN in early 2006 showed that C-SPAN would leverage its trademark rights to force the removal of floor footage. The real story here is one of selective enforcement, and how citizens have no real, reusable, permanent access to committee footage.

Update: As boing boing pointed out today Carl is working to change the situation of limited archival access to committee footage. Check out what he has grabbed so far.

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