Congressional Camera Controversy

A few days ago, the NY Times editorialized in favor of relaxing the rules regarding cameras on the floor of the US Congress. This comes on the heels of an open letter (PDF File) by C-SPAN president Brian Lamb calling for independent media cameras (particularly C-SPAN’s) on the floor of the House. In addition to editorials on his behalf, Lamb appeared on numerous media outlets including this interview on NPR’s Talk of The Nation to lobby for these changes.

Much of the discourse around these proposed changes is a critique of the cinematography of C-SPAN, particularly on the head-on closeups that the House Rules require. Furthermore, Lamb suggests that relaxing the rules would be more consistent with House Speaker Pelosi’s “most open, honest and ethical congress ever,” with an implication that the government may be covering something up through these tight controls.

On Friday, Pelosi rejected these proposed changes and will leave the House in charge of the cameras. There are a few issues at work here, I’ll address them briefly and what they mean for this project. More after the fold.

Metavid is able to re-use the video footage of the House and Senate floor that C-SPAN airs because it is a government work. When a government employee creates something as part of his or her job, the resulting content is public domain. As Lamb’s letter references, C-SPAN already has its own cameras in committee chambers. C-SPAN’s coverage of committee hearings, such as the Alito nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, is perhaps more nuanced than the head-on shots found in floor proceedings. During some of the tougher questions, cameras captured the reactions of his family — that would not be possible under the current house rules. I would love to link to a clip in our archives illustrating the difference, but the fact that the cameras are privately held has another effect; the footage is copyrighted.

Under current copyright law, C-SPAN’s recordings of the Alito hearings will not enter the public domain for 95 years, meaning January of the year 2101 assuming there are no further extensions of copyright term (an unsafe assumption in the current IP climate). Until that time, C-SPAN exerts their authority over this footage by applying these restrictions (from c-span’s archive):

A license is needed for: Public Performances (Showing in a group or unrelated individuals with or without a fee); Documentaries, films or television programs; Multimedia applications; Corporate video uses; Presentation at association or corporate meetings. C-SPAN does not permit the following uses: Duplication licenses (ask about bulk copies fees); Any posting or streaming from an Internet site; Airing on public access or local cable television channels; Fundraising Use; Commercial/Advertising.

In an age of YouTube and video blogging, it’s absurd to restrict access to video documents so central to public policy. Allowing a century of monopoly over congressional footage to media corporations goes against the very notions of public accountability and political sunshine that brought the cameras to the floor in the first place.

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Licensing Openness the aGPL and the metavid code base.

here is snipit from my thesis about the metavid code licence. The full paper will be available in a open contestble format shortly I belive aphids version will be as well

Licensing the metavid code base was an important element of the praxis of open source. Several licenses were considered to secure the freedom of participants to re-negotiate the mediations enabled by the metavid software. This survey and license selection process addressed the problems of contemporary archival systems, through the practice of open source licensing.

BSD styled licenses are generally considered the most liberal licenses and are comparable to releasing code under the public domain. The metavid code base under a BSD license would mirror the public domain qualities of the media assets that make up the metavid archive. But a BSD style license was not selected because metavid participants did not want mediations based on the metavid codebase to become closed source and lose the qualities that open source praxis promoted. Under a BSD style licensee future version of the software could be closed source and make mediation opaque, un-contestable and privately owned. This would limit the possibility for creative reconstructions, limit transparency and make the archives construction less contestable. The GPL or general public licensee was considered a good fit as it would preserve access to the source code for derivate work.

As Metavid begin to closely investigate the GPL in the context of online services it was discovered that network services were not considered as a form of software distribution. Since it was important that all participants in metavid have access to the source code regardless of wheatear the software was installed locally or ran over a network, we chose the aGPL (the affero general public license). This little known license is nearly identical to the GPL with the exception of online usage of aGPL code must include a link to the source. This address the issues of web services getting around the distribution of the alterations to the code base that they have made, by declaring “any user interacting with the Program [is] given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program’s complete source code”. (agpl sec 2d)

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